Turn Turn Turn

Whether you know that line as being from the Book of Ecclesiastes, or a Byrds songwritten by Pete Seeger*, or neither, you’re dating yourself.

And it’s important that we date ourselves now (ahem, not romantically). Where are you in your lifecycle? Where is our troubled nation in its lifecycle? How much more turning are you cool with?

Blessed doubly/separately this week, I was reconnected with the two smartest executives in television research.

First, Julie Piepenkotter dropped some wisdom on Facebook that made me think about cycles:

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” ― Cynthia Occelli

The next day, Jane Gould encouraged me to go dig up my William Strauss & Neil Howe books. They who coined Millennials. They who predicted a global catastrophe (the finale of four twenty-year “turnings” within an eighty-year saeculum) to come due in um 2020.

Jane and I are not the first to notice the current-events a-ha-ness of Strauss & Howe’s prophecies (the New York Times made the connection on May 28th).

One S&H book passage floored me - “We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves.” Symbolic gesture as in, oh, I don’t know, perhaps doing nothing personally for the Black Lives Matter movement since that switch of your social avatar to a black square for a day?

Timely quote, huh? Yeah, that’s from a book written in 1997 (The Fourth Turning) advancing a theory from another book written in 1991 (Generations). 

This is not a Pessimism post. Strauss & Howe have generational archetypes long ago mapped out that support my Hopefulness – here come the Artists and then the Prophets, right on time.

Zoom out please. Think 20 years and not 20 minutes. Lose the myopia, the hubris, the whole “Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” Proverb-ial mindset. Those of you who won’t wear a mask for four hours annoy me. Those of you who think this will all resolve itself once your local eatery re-opens four days from now concern me. Those of you who believe this will all correct itself with the elections four months from now amuse me.

Of course I’m just projecting, as usual. I the creaky quinquagenarian with the recent career change and the first-born off to college.

We’re all just in Winter. Winter “of our discontent” (Shakespeare, 1594). Winter “of our hardship” (Obama, 2009). Do these last 100 days NOT feel like a perpetual Snow Day? Let us all hang in there until Spring.

Let us all lean into the turns. In motorcycling, you actually are (per some gyroscopic physics voodoo) to press the handlebars in the direction you want to go. So-called countersteering is counter-intuitive, but hell, what isn’t lately? 

It’s the end of the saeculum as we know it, and I feel fine.

*Hear also Bob Dylan’s “Percy’s Song” (with the powerful refrain “turn, turn, turn again” and the seasonal plea “turn, turn, to the rain and the wind”).