Fall: the Reckoning

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We like to think we are Masters of Nature. Nothing debunks that lie like Fall.

Nothing betrays so vividly that we are creatures of our planet. We are locked into the rhythm of seasons set by the tilt of Earth’s axis 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the Sun.

In the Northern Hemisphere, Fall is a time when squirrels stop prancing and playing and start collecting and storing their acorns. It’s a time when colder weather empties parks and beaches of people, in anticipation of their being washed with rain and covered with snow. It’s a time when stock markets crash: October 1929, September 2008 and now early September 2020, in what will undoubtedly be called the “Covid Crash of 2020.” (The Internet and electronic trading appear to have accelerated the stampede of fear that inevitably follows the much slower stampede of greed and euphoria.)

Why is all this so? It’s pretty simple. Fall marks the end of the euphoria of summer and a transition back to the harsh reality of life on Earth.

Don’t take my word for it. Go back to the first recorded democracy, ancient Greece, and more than halfway to the dawn of recorded history. Go back to Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants. In late Fall, the music-playing grasshopper begs for food from the ants, who’ve industriously stored it in summer, anticipating Fall. It’s a tale with a simple moral: if you don’t get serious before Fall, you won’t have anything to eat in winter.

A friend and former student of mine, Rod Haven, has an interesting take on our Grasshopper-in-Chief. He voted for Trump in 2016 but has since repented. Here’s what he says:

“Trump supporters simply . . . cannot string more than one fact together at a time. . . . Most middle-class folks here in Ohio just want to see and listen to one liners that say Trump is going to take care of them, and that is all they need to hear.”

Yet Fall is upon us.

This year, it’s not just the usual colder weather and shorter days. It’s Covid and its economic effects, too. It’s people having to cluster indoors and give up social distancing because of the cold. It’s “freedom”-loving grasshoppers not wearing their masks, or wearing them on their chins or under their noses, where they don’t do much good. It’s other grasshoppers spreading the lie that vaccines don’t work. It’s kids staying home from school and parents slowing realizing that, as clever and resilient as they think they are, they aren’t teachers. They don’t have the knowledge, the training, the experience, or the patience. (Maybe Covid will at last help teachers get some respect, if not salaries that reflect their value!)

And this is just the beginning. What hotspots will emerge when people are clustered indoors and can’t distance themselves properly? What failures of foresight, imagination and general seriousness will maim our systems production and distribution? what excesses of cartoon ideologies? Will some foods and other necessities become as scarce as masks, toilet paper and isopropyl alcohol have been for so long?

Sooner or later, the grasshoppers’ la-di-da incompetence and “it’s all right, Jack” euphoria will take their toll. Trump has put grasshoppers in charge of everything from our Post Office, through the EPA, to our Interior, Justice and Agriculture Departments and international trade. Many are not just grasshoppers; they’re corrupt, ill-informed, deniers of science and stupid, too. They’re living proof that you don’t have to be smart to be rich, especially if you got so by inheritance. So which system will break down first? Let’s take bets.

Here in Santa Fe, NM, the daytime temperature dropped from 90°F to 37°F in just a couple of days. Sometimes Fall can come with a vengeance. That seems to be true all over this year. Covid makes it all worse, especially for the non-white, the unemployed, the aged, and the evicted.

The season is well named. Sometimes it feels like falling. This year, as our stock markets, our economy and our collective health go into free fall, the name is especially apt.

Holding elections in mid-Fall is a good idea. The season brings voters back to reality, and the timing lets it set in. The question before us is whether more voters are ants than grasshoppers, and whether even some grasshoppers can see the writing on the wall. The answers will fix our nation’s fate for years to come, perhaps forever. Where is ancient Rome today? Where is Aesop’s Greece?

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