THE SILENTS I LEFT BEHIND

The following paragraphs at this time serve as a conclusion to an essay, "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis", which I continue to labor over:

Sometimes I have a vision of my friend and his circles of friends and acquaintances that troubles me greatly because, even to myself, I sound arrogant when I share the vision. Still, I continually experience the vision. It’s as if I see across a Cosmic distance from the Moon where I’m perched to the Earth where they sit. Those Silents who remained behind with John Wayne are still seated at the campfire from which I departed three-quarters of a century ago. They’ve not moved an inch in that time. They remain stationary, farting and belching, swapping tall tales, contentedly circled around a bone fire with Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles cowboys. From my position on the Moon’s surface, my eyes easily encompass the warm and comforting fire and the circle of those who stayed behind.

Van Gogh's Starry Night, of course.

From my distance above their campfire, my vision also encompasses the vast darkness that surrounds them, against which they have turned their backs. They appear so vulnerable to me and unprepared to face the Cosmic darkness that surrounds them that I’m saddened. These are not ignorant people, I tell myself. They just weren’t curious enough—or courageousness enough? I don’t know which label to assign. Or they understandably placed their priorities elsewhere than in the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I can easily understand and sympathize with my college buddy with many children who put his nose to the grindstone and uncomplainingly made a living and supported his large family, rising financially to become a six-figure man. Of all my mixed feelings about my compatriots from the Twentieth Century, I’m happy that I know that man. He’s the model for the American Dream.

Because of my love for many of them—my fellow Silents and many Boomers too—I sympathize with those decent men and women circled in the darkness, staring at the flickering tongues of fire. They’re human after all, just like me, with their fears and hopes and their love stories and tales of struggle and survival, but as I look upon them, I become aware of their ignorance of the details of the Cosmic reality the human species inhabits. Their ignorance of the bare facts is unbelievably dense and imprisoning and, suddenly, before my eyes, they shrink into the misty past. It becomes very clear to me that they might as well be living in First Century Jerusalem or Eleventh Century Italy or pre-Darwinian England as living in 21^st Century America.

From where I sit on the Moon, I now know and accept that few of those old timers will ever leave the comforting campfire. They sat around it as children and sit around it still. It’s never too late to change—I know that. Maybe one or two will see the light before they pass into final darkness, but, for the greater number of them, it’s too late. For my pal of college days…that really makes me sad.