Midnight in America

In Woody Allen’s recent film, "Midnight in Paris," the Owen Wilson character, while sitting on the steps of a building at midnight, is whisked off in a car from the 1920s and literally taken back into that decade, a decade which he repeatedly expressed a desire to inhabit.  He eventually meets a woman from the ‘20s who says she has always wished she lived at the turn of the century.  At which point the Wilson character, in an epiphanic moment, tells the woman that if she had lived in that time, she would have preferred living in another time – suggesting that we should all be content with the time in which we live. 

I wonder how many of us are content with living in this decade:  staggeringly high unemployment; rapidly decreasing home values; high medical costs (with more and more doctors opting out of Medicare); a crippled economy (both here and across Europe); fragile financial institutions; a downgraded U.S. credit rating; and, worst of all, an at-odds-with-each-other political cast more concerned with their own personal ambitions that they are with trying to fix any of these problems.

I wonder how many of us would like to sit on the steps of Town Hall at midnight and have a car pick us up and sweep us back to, say, the ‘80s, or the ‘70s, or the ‘60s.  

Sure, those periods had their disadvantages just as this one has its advantages. But I, for one, would definitely sacrifice my cell phone for a sounder banking system. Or my GPS for affordable medical care I can rely on. Or cable TV for a choice of presidential candidates who don’t scare the pants off me.  

We can’t really go back in time, of course. Nor should we want to. We should want to move ahead. And given today’s problems, we should want to move ahead quickly.  (And, of course, intelligently.)  The Owen Wilson character finally realized that everyone should do their best to make the most out of the here and now. Let’s pray that through some miracle, our politicians have the same epiphany.