Stability and Change: What We Want Versus What We've Got

People and organizations seek stability. When we have it things seem to go pretty well, when it evaporates we become edgy, cranky, hostile, difficulty, obstinate, and sometimes violent. The problem is that stability is really like those magazine covers that Norman Rockwell used to paint for the Saturday Evening Post, a victim of changing times and changing tastes and probably something you don't remember.

You can find copies of those paintings on line, just Google Norman Rockwell. He was quite popular during the 30s and into the early to mid 60s. Rockwell's illustrations are just wonderful. They depict the America that we all wish American really was. He focused on the local, personal, and sometimes looney aspects of American life. There's a warmth there. In those illustratiions the melting pot lives and people find harmony in their connection to a great nation.

I remember when I was a child that we would visit my grandparents on the weekends. We had a great lunch as my grandmother and grandfather lived on a farm most of their lives and my grandmother cooked like she was cooking for my grandfather after a hard and long day of farm work.  A normal Sunday lunch included two meats (usually fried chicken or rabbit and something like ham loaf or meat loaf), greens slathered in bacon grease (collards, turnip greens, Kale, etc.), mash potatoes in mounds with gravey, biscuits with more bacon grease , and dessert. With all that cholesterol I'm surprised I'm still living.

Things got boring after lunch and my grandmother would hand me a stack of Look Magazines and the Saturday Evening Post. Yes, Look is long gone as well. Anybody remember Grit? You are too young. She also gave me crayons, scissors, and glue in hopes that I would entertain myself and not become a pest in my boredom. By the way, they didn't have tv until much later on.

I was always taken by those paintings and most of my friends probably were too because that's what we believed about our country. It was a very protected view of heroic American acts and sacrifice. I learned about American greatness, the Soviet threat, the Razorbacks, family, and good conservative Democratic politics. I did not learn about a nation undergoing fundamental change in the relationship between white and black Americans, our struggles in Vietnam, the rights of women, and our own fallibility as Americans.

I was unprepared for change but I was young I was not put off by it although many I knew struggled with it. We were prepared for stability but we got radical, continual, and turbulent change. I sure wish American was like the Norman Rockwell vision of the past. I was more comfortable with that but we were all so naive and we ignored things that we really needed to deal with. When 1968 hit and the Norman Rockwell view of the world shattered in Watts, Newark, and Detroit we all felt a adrift because nothing was stable anymore. My hair was down to my shoulders, I wore the same bell bottom jeans for weeks without a wash along with the same peace shirt and my trusty Buffalo sandals. I listened to Hendrix, Joplin, Blue Cheer, Dylan, Jim Morrison and others who fed change. I read Marx, Hesse, Camus, Sartre, Gide, Kerouac, Sallinger and became more radical by the day. Others struggled and went the opposite direction and I think they hated where America went because they wanted so much for things to be the way Rockwell painted them. They wanted stability, the wanted relationships with people of different cultures to remain the same, they wanted their wives to stay home with the children, they wanted their church to grow and prosper, the wanted America to rule the world. They were bitter because it didn't happen that way.

I've often thought about the dynamic tension between the desire for stability and the reality of change. I've lived through a lot of changes some not so good, some humorous, and some really outrageous. But there are some days when things are quiet when I think about my grandparents and their simplicity and love. When I think about those lunches and the magazines and the security for a few minutes I really really wish things were like that even though I know in my heart that there was so much that was so wrong.

What kind of person are you? And what will you remember? Will you embrace where the world goes or will you always be a little angry that things changed so much?