Fairytale Endings

I've never understood the phrase fairytale endings to describe those Hallmark Television like codas where everything works out for the best. Most childhood fairytale I endings I recall were anything but happy. Most were intended to teach a moral or life lesson and the underlying theme was that life was anything but a bowl of cherries. Now I do not watch a lot of commercial television, in fact nothing on the major networks. Much of what I do watch is foreign and unlike the majority of US shows the endings are unconventional. I wonder, does 'Hollywood' give us what we Americans want, or has it shaped our expectations that in the end, all will be well?

Spend any time at all in other parts of the world and you'll find that while our country has its charms for some, at best we are often regarded as somewhat naive or immature. To be sure our history, such as it is, is very brief compared to the rest of the world and that may have something to do with our lack of gravitas. We are cultural infants stumbling around a universe dating hundreds, even thousands of years before we were conceived. We have barely entered our terrible twos and like most children of that age we are fretful, annoying, and struggling to make sense of the world around us. Perhaps that is why we prefer lullabies to real life drama.

Please don't get me wrong. There is something endearing about our faith that there are happy endings even if the circumstances at the moment are anything but. But our plucky belief that the hero doesn't die, the war is finally won, and love conquers all may be what renders us passive in the face of existential threats to our own and humanity's future. Too many of us are complacent in the face of clear and present danger, unprepared to accept responsibility for the challenges that besiege us. Perhaps that is why we seem to have a preference of late for authoritarian figures, strong men who will feed us pablum about a glorious return to days that never were, even as they strip us of our rights and freedoms. The world watches weary at the replay they have lived and not forgotten.

Few of us have experienced real war, real privation, certainly none alive can recall a time when our divisions had grown so great as to take up arms against each other. No one who has could ever contemplate a reprise as some fantasize in social media posts. For most of us, WW II , Korea, Vietnam are stories told. Even the majority of those who serve in our armed forces are too young to have a frame of reference for world war, famine, and genocide. Generations raised on fairytale endings are not equipped for the precarious world of today. We fret about Artificial Intelligence and consume nightmarish stories about machine versus human war in a dystopian future even as we ignore the real and present systematic erosion of our rules of law and our way of life.

Less than half of us even bother to vote in elections. Is it cynicism, apathy, or some misguided faith that a better future, peace in our time, the preservation of our ideals will somehow all work out as it should? The odds against catastrophe for all mankind are growing exponentially and we, America, are at the heart of the disunion, lacking the will that once we summoned to unite with others in the necessary fight to preserve humanity. Instead we moan about the price of gasoline and food while we ignore true poverty in overwhelming numbers, rising xenophobia, and a reversal of what small progress has been made to alter climate catastrophe, and eliminate disease.

It is long past the time when we must face up to the reality that a happy ending is only secured by our willingness to fashion it ourselves. We may not always prevail against natural disaster but those we fashion out of our own ignorance, hatred, and fear are within our power to address. How the story will unfold in the next several months is in our hands. What will the ending be, a fairytale or a horror show?