Thieves of Hope

An essayist argues that not every cloudneed have a somber lining.

By Harry Stein, published on September 01, 1992 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

As my Aunt Ruth told it, she was walking home from the movie theater, lost in conversation with her friend Millie, when the guy nearly bowled her over.

"Actually," she said, "I figured it was probably my own fault. You know what a big talker Millie is." (In fact, as a former New Rochelle neighbor of Carl Reiner, she inspired the Petries' gabby friend of the same name on the old 1960s Dick Van Dyke Show.) "And neither of us had been paying much attention to where we were going. I ended up apologizing to him."

It was only when she got home that Ruth realized her wallet was gone.

Even now, a day later, she remained shaken and depressed. Which, in turn, shook me. Ruth is the kind of person every family should be lucky enough to have, a dogged optimist with inexhaustible style and sass. At sixty-something, a widow with an enthusiasm for Mozart and Matisse, she had watched many of the rules of decency and decorum with which her generation came of age fall to the grasping tumult of contemporary fife. Yet never had I seen her good humor falter.

Indeed, the one time she'd been robbed previously, a pickpocket somehow lifting her bank cards from her purse in a New York City supermarket, she had turned the incident into a hilarious dinner-table tale of criminal ineptitude. It seems the guy called later that night, identifying himself as "Lieutenant Vincent" of the N.Y.P.D. "We've recovered the wallet," he told her, "and have the perpetrators in hand. Now, m'am, if you'll just give us your bank-card code for purposes of verification."

Ruth loved it. "He was trying so awfully hard, he actually pronounced it 'poipetrators', I just had to play along. That sounded fine to me, I said, but perhaps I might speak to one of his superiors." There was a 30-second pause, then the same guy came back on the line, introducing himself as "Captain Kelly." This went on all the way up the chain of command, until Ruth finally sent him off into the night--with a phony bank code.

In brief, her attitude had always been that even the uglier aspects of modern urban life were no more menacing than one made them.

But this time was different. Ruth had lately been ill and was now uneasily awaiting the result of an upper G.I. series. The L.A. riots, just the week before, had put everyone even more than normally on edge. The wallet had been precious, a birthday gift from her daughter. Its loss was evidently a kind of last straw. "Maybe," she put it to me wearily, "people are right."

Right, that is, about the character of existence. As the T-shirts have it: "Life is hard, and then you die." Pessimism is the emotional fashion of the day. To turn on the TV is to be assaulted by a world spinning out of control. Potential calamity seems to lurk at every turn--not just from strangers in the street, but via global warming and the deficit and rampant homelessness. Every family looks to be dysfunctional. Alcoholism is at epidemic proportions. So is child abuse. To find anything even resembling careless joy, one has to search for scratchy black and white movies from the 1930s.

On some level we're aware of this about ourselves, sometimes even smile about it. Woody Allen didn't get to be known as a minor genius for nothing. "Bummer" reads the title of the magazine featured in a cartoon by the New Yorker's gifted Roz Chast, over a picture of an incredibly anxiety-ridden guy. The cover lines: "Why Your House is Practically Worthless In Today's Market"; "Ninety-eight percent of Spouses Are Unfaithful"; "What Your 'Friends' Say About You Behind Your Back"; "How Frankfurters Are Made."

But in a deeper sense, we almost never assess the consequences of such an attitude. Indeed, the prevailing ethic endows it with a certain nobility. We are, after all, merely facing facts. Can there be any doubt that the ills of our time are profoundly disheartening? Doesn't having a conscience mean, at least in part, identifying with the suffering of others? Objectively speaking, has there ever been a time when desperation was so much the norm?

Actually, the answers are no, yes, and ... what are we, crazy?!

For, of course, the quite obvious fact is that in vital ways these are also the very best of times. No less an authority on calamity than Mikhail Gorbachev pronounces himself utterly baffled by the American state of mind; he writes wonderingly that earlier this year, while touring the United States, he repeatedly found himself in the bizarre position of having to defend America to Americans. Coming from a society with no food on the shelves and no prospects for the future, things sure as hell looked okay to him. Why do we seem to insist on finding even in good news--even the end of the Cold War--a somber lining?

That, finally, is the question most worthy of consideration. What's happened to us? To our sense of perspective? To our capacity for optimism and simple joy? Why, in the privacy of our own lives, even when things are going well, is there so often something subtly, unmistakably wrong?

Indeed, over the next few days, it was hard not to note in my own small circle Aunt Ruth's story being transformed from a personal misfortune to yet another bit of evidence in support of the general world view. Whenever it came up, the conversation instantly turned indignant. Jesus, ran the reaction, what's happening to this country?! And, invariably, a raft of similar stories would follow.