Our best human projects survive because they are aspirational, offbeat, and fun, observes Auden Schendler. What does that say about defining our paths forward through this time of darkness?

 

by Auden Schendler

One day, an English teacher at my gigantic public high school in Manhattan paused the lesson.

He placed his hands shoulder-width apart on his ancient desk. He hooked his toes on the rim of the chalkboard behind him, and there he
was: suspended in the air, floating above the sullen earth toward the end of Period 3 on a dismal November day.

“Have you ever seen anyone do this before?” he asked.

He looked around from his perch, mischievous joy sparkling in his eyes beneath his mop of white hair. He held the pose, and then the period
bell rang.

That the teacher happened to be Frank McCourt, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” is only partly
relevant. Mr. McCourt was celebrating the weirdness and joy of being human, the possibility and story in every moment.

And, like all good artists, he was messing with our heads, to pop us out of our usual selves, into the realms of creativity and new thought
that have always moved civilizations forward.

For a teenager unhappy to be in school at all, he was a welcome light.

The Portland Frog reminded me of that moment now 40 years ago, the way it stood there with its belly out like a 3-year-old asking for
cookies, and the unbelievable, cowboy-laconic toughness the suit’s occupant expressed after an ICE agent pepper sprayed his vent hole:
“I’ve definitely had spicier tamales.”

Contrast this great fun to today’s singularly humorless White House, as best exemplified by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. In a recent
exchange, a reporter inquired about the significance of a Putin-Trump summit meeting proposed for Budapest. Why there? In 1994, that’s where
Russia promised not to invade Ukraine if that country gave up its nuclear weapons.

Leavitt responded with a string of insults. But the question was actually interesting and thoughtful: It would have been more fun to
mull its implications than to be a jerk.

Deranged as Trump is, he had always been funny. But even that modestly redeeming trait seems gone in this bleakly self-serious White House.
If I were an autocrat in training, I’d be worried about that, on durability grounds.

The late anthropologist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow are known for rethinking early human history in a way that
credits neolithic peoples with intelligence and whimsy. In the spirit of the Portland Frog or Mr. McCourt, early humans may have initially
avoided labor-intensive agriculture because they had other things to do, including storytelling, masquerades, or traveling. Maybe early
signs of trade were not nascent capitalism, they argue, but the result of vision quests; or of women gambling.

Our best human projects survive because they are aspirational, offbeat, and fun. Early democracy in the U.S. was certainly colored by
those qualities. When an exhausted John Adams arrived in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, he went straight to a bar — City
Tavern. Pursuit of happiness, anyone? And yes, dark projects occur, but they rarely last long.

Visiting my mother recently in that same city of Philadelphia, close to her 88th birthday, I wondered what characteristics lead to a long
life and other lasting human projects.

My mom marched in “No Kings” Day. She suggested we visit a unique beer shop with hundreds of ales to get some Thai beer to pair with our
meal. And perhaps, she wondered, you would like to attend the euphonium concert I’m hosting tomorrow night?

Helping her declutter her storage closet, I held up a Chock full o’Nuts Coffee can. “What are we doing with this?” I asked. “I was
saving it because it had the Twin Towers on it… it might be valuable.”

Indeed, the can featured the skyline of my youth. “It’s art,” I said. “We’ll keep it,” placing it on a shelf for display, an Arabica-scented
monument to a city as it once was, still a place of joy and loss and resilience.

Photos from within ICE detention centers show a contrasting vision of the city: pictures of humans in distress, put upon by violent, masked
monstrous agents. The victims’ faces were a panoply of the diversity of the American experience. Perhaps some were vicious criminals, but
most seemed to be moms, children, or laborers. They looked like the friends, neighbors, and workers I see and greet every day at City
Market here in Colorado.

If they were really Tren de Aragua, would they be crying?

In the contrast between that dungeon and my mom’s happiness project, I caught a glimpse of the reason our country has endured and thrived,
even despite many imperfections.

We’ve ultimately rewarded, and been rewarded by, entrepreneurial joy, and those projects have often succeeded: the World’s Fairs; the
National Parks; the Broncos and Nuggets.

The purveyors of darkness just aren’t that compelling to those of us who aspire to a measure of glee and wonder in our brief days and
years.

That quality may not be enough to save us now, but it’s a force, for certain, to be reckoned with.

This essay first appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 30 under the title “Joy, Joylessness and the American Project.” Auden
Schendler is a writer and climate activist who lives in Western Colorado. His most recent book is “Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with
Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.”