The Long Perspective

This week I started and finished, in time for spring break, the third of four sections of a self-paced Intermediate Algebra class. And I got an A on it. It was a chunk of learning that is designed to take at least three weeks, if not a semester. I am hoping to finish the next section by the end of the semester. I'm pushing myself to get through the whole course in a semester partly because I need to keep moving toward about my eventual re-application to UC Berkeley's policy school, the career move that will end, blessedly if only temporarily, my long ten-year drag under the glass ceiling of non-profit generic catch-all jobs where I inevitably feel the weight of the egos of my heirarchical superiors driving me towards a future where I hope to someday be their boss. The late nights, doing math until 2 or 3 am, feel like an indulgence in my dream of a better future. My current non-profit low-20's glass ceiling drag is feeling particularly futile right now-- battling the clock to get small $1,000 to $17,000 grants to small vulnerable environmental organizations in Russia. In one week the new Russian NGO law comes into force which will suspend my work on processing these small grants, perhaps indefinitely. I complain about what I'm paid, but looking at the payrolls in the project budgets for these little enviro projects... it gives some perspective. And if throwing these peanuts into the cage feels like an exercise in futility, what must it feel like to the recipients in that cage-that-is-Russia...

And some more perspective. Feeling like I'm in this embattled nonprofit organizing world at a dead run -- such that looking out the BART train window I tend to wonder whether I'm going home or going to work -- I've been grounding myself by reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. The story of the first month of World War One.

Wikipedia gives the summary.

By the end of August, the French Army had suffered 75,000 dead of which 27,000 were killed on 22 August alone. Total French casualties for the first month of the war were 260,000 of which 140,000 were sustained during the climactic final four days of the battle of the Frontiers.

Tuchman's book quotes some reports from the Battle of the Frontiers where the pile of dead was being compared to the image of a tidal wave falling at a 60 degree angle. Germany's conscripts were marching in dense formation and were mowed down in such a way that the French defenders were finding that the wall of dead created cover for the oncoming battalions. The world at that time was such that officers wore white gloves into battle. The cavalry with its swords was deployed against machine guns and heavy artillery. The old world and new world collapsed into a putrid wasteland of trenches and wire. And, most appalling of all, the presiding monarchs of the three prime players in this war were all cousins. One could say this bloody debacle was a family spat gone terribly terribly wrong.

So in my moments of feeling like I'm in a long uphill drag in a vast exercise in futility, I like a little perspective. The building I walk by every day to and from BART - the Kaiser Auditorium - has a gorgeous facade of Beaux Arts relief with the allegorical themes of a land at peace: the joy of effort, the consolation of the arts, the wealth of the earth. An agrarian, intelligent view of the world. The facade is dated 1914. I get chills looking at it, knowing that perhaps the very month that facade was installed the world changed forever, the ferocity of modern warfare erupted and-- to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"-- "the dancers [went] under the hill."

Back in undergrad study, I imagined something like the hill home from a Tolkein hobbit village as the hill that the dancers were gone under. But the hills, the earth-- it was where you buried those villagers caught in the warfare that was waged in fields of wheat. I read "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the principal repeating image you are given is that the earth is solace. You want to crawl into it to get away from the death, stench, bombs. You have the taste of it in your mouth, and you want to become earth, wide and broad and low and dead. And safe. You want to be gone under the hill.

So, here I am. Still alive, still racing around, making my futile gestures at bettering the world, while bombs go off daily in a country my country destroyed in a gesture at fixing it, and yet there is not, and will not be, the kind of war of attrition that was World War One. The modern war is deadly but there are no battles where 27,000 die in one day. Tsunamis, yes, but not battles with that kind of human impact.

It is grim but it is still something for which I can be grateful. War has evolved, still a monster, but evolved.