In 16th-century Ireland, the area surrounding and including the capital city of Dublin was referred to as “the Pale.” It was the section of the country under complete British control, and anything outside of the enclosing fence made of posts driven deep into the earth, or pales, was thought to be uncivilized and uninhabitable. To leave the pale meant to leave the jurisdiction of British Law and no longer be under its authority or control. Today, we commonly use the phrase “beyond the pale” to define something as outside of cultural norms or acceptable behavior.
Of course, this is where, with a grin on my face, I remind you that my ancestors, that lineage that would bear revolutionaries, writers, and indeed, poets, lived far, far beyond the pale.
Perhaps we should follow their lead.
What does this mean for you and for me? Well, over the next several weeks I’d like to explore with you the idea the idea that just because the civilized world seems to be careening in a certain direction does not mean that it is doomed to continue. Men and women throughout history have been willing to stand against the tides of perceived inevitability and, in doing so, accomplished what Archimedes could have only dreamed of when he, while explaining the concept of a lever, said, “Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand—and I will move the world.”
Let’s start here.
I am thirty-six years old as I type this to you today. I have no idea how old you are as you read these words or where you are as you do so. Truthfully, I know almost nothing about you. And yet, I would trade all of the money in my pockets (almost none) against all of the money in your pockets that you sense what I do: that the world is tentatively balanced on a razor’s edge as we dance upon eggshells we layered the floor with ourselves.
A generation of dreamy boys and girls have grown into men and women whose nails are dug deep into fairytales and visions of a future that is slowly sloughing off the skeleton of what life is turning out to be. We were told we could be whatever we wanted to be and that we could do whatever we would work hard enough to do, and we are wondering when those statements will come to fruition. The institutions we were raised to admire are faltering and failing to live up to the unfair expectations we placed upon them. We grew up watching The West Wing, only to discover that the work of governing is far from glamorously selfless, and no one (no one) sounds like Martin Sheen. We marveled at the discipline and sacrifice of businessmen and women who left everything behind in order to make the kinds of fortune reserved for kings and queens until it dawned on us that no amount of money ever brought back the time with family and friends that had been lost forever. Pop stars became our pastors, newsmen traded information for entertainment, and evils we thought had long been defeated turned out to only have been laying dormant. We made idols of institutions, and the inevitable happened.
You were complicit, and so was I. Why? Because the world is a scary place to feel unmoored in, it seemed safer to live within the pale than to venture out beyond it.
So, we are faced with a choice. Each of us will have to make this decision independently of one another, and each of us will approach it from a slightly different angle as the shadows of our past experiences and present circumstances throw into stark relief the difficulty of answering the question in front of us.
Do we as a generation abandon these institutions to their bitter ends, or do we breathe new life into them with an idealism that the world believes all but extinguished?
'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo.
'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'
Much has been written about my generation (a quick Google search reveals that we apparently killed the top sheet, napkins, and mayonnaise), and while we have had very little control over that conversation up until now, the time has come for these dreamy boys and girls, with our fingernails dug deep into those fairytales and dreams, to lock eyes with a broken and cynical world and do the unexpected…
We did it when we sat in science classes and hallways as some teachers turned the televisions off, and others let us watch in confused horror.
We did it as the market fell out from under our parents, and the stability of long careers came crashing down around us.
We did it with diplomas held in hand as, over and over again, the emails read, “We’re looking for someone with years of professional experience.”
We’ve done it against the backdrop of wars and protests, scandals and school shootings, and we did it again when sickness swept across continents, and the most interconnected people in history splintered into tribes and factions coalesced by pixels instead of personal relationships.
“This isn’t what we wanted,” you’ll scream.
“I know,” I’ll whisper, “but what a chance we now have.”
Anyone can dream of making a difference when times are good; the committed take it upon themselves to fight for something more when the hand dealt is less than ideal. We ran through backyards once, flying headlong toward a moon that wasn’t a moon. We walked through the wardrobe into snow-covered forests and laughed with friends in dusty corners of castles, eating jellybeans that tasted like grass. We marveled at the nobility on the pages of our books and the sacrifice in the stories of our grandfathers. We did these things because we believed that tomorrow could be better than yesterday if heroes were willing to pay the price.
Are we willing?
Will you and I hand over the currency of our comfort and shed the security blanket of cynicism we’ve so easily slipped underneath? For the sake of the world, I hope so. I hope those of us who believed so deeply in the powerful force for good that a government can be run for office and return a sense of morality and statesmanship to those hallowed halls. I hope that those of us who have witnessed the unchecked ambition and greed of man start businesses and run them in a way that stops the marketplace in its tracks because they are both successful and caring. I hope that those of us who have been hurt by churches and representations of God dive deeper into His character and work to be beacons of grace. Let’s realize that opinions matter and must be weighed against facts, that the loudest voice isn’t always the right one, and that productive conversations shouldn’t have winners and losers. What if we expand our attention span, not shrink it beyond measure, and work to see things we don’t understand as opportunities to grow instead of shrinking back in fear?
The easy answer to the question above is to burn everything to the ground with the fury of the most bitter generation in history. The harder answer is always to choose to do something great when the risk of failure may cost you your life. With whatever call to revolution is left in my bloodline, I urge you to refuse to grow calloused and cruel, living in the false sense of security within the fence line of the current age, and instead, take up that banner of decency, honor, and rebellion that you adore in paragraphs and scenes and fight like hell to create a different world; day by day, conversation by conversation, choice by choice.
Eighty years ago, dreamy boys and girls fought battles because the world needed them to, and we labeled them the greatest generation because they answered that call. What will be said of us in 80 years? What choices will we make in the next twenty and the twenty after that? We’re going to leave something behind; why not make it worthy of the lives we’ll spend on it?