BY MICHAEL C. PATTERSON
In the Spring of 1970, I was cast as Prospero in an Antioch College production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is preposterous that a 23-year-old could do justice to the role of a powerful elderly magician, but I was excited about the opportunity. Shakespeare’s poetry is magnificent and I was particularly drawn to the idea that Shakespeare, through Prospero, was bidding farewell to the magic of the theater and relinquishing his power and influence as a poet.
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
In the middle of rehearsals two events shook the nation. On May 4, members of the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of protesting students at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. Less than two weeks later, on May 15, police shot into a crowd of protesters at Jackson State University, killing a college student and a 17-year-old high school student. The murdered children were protesting the senseless war in Vietnam and the persistent scourge of racism in America.
Student activists on my campus called for a general strike to protest the murders and the suppression of dissent. The entire campus voted to shut down all normal activities, including the production of The Tempest. I never got to play Prospero.
Now, nearly six decades later, students around the country are again expressing outrage about the atrocities of violence and bigotry, including the inhumanity of the Israeli/Hamas conflict in Gaza. Yet again, some of the student protesters have been arrested by the police for daring to criticize bad behavior by those in power.
During the Antioch strike I joined a group led by Black activists who took an interesting approach to their protests. They chose to heal wounds and bridge divisions.
“If you honkies want to march in the streets and get your heads bashed in by the police, go ahead. We are going to Wright-Patterson air force base to talk with military families.”
Talking, or more to the point listening, sounded like a good idea to me.
We were prepped for our trip to the military base. We were instructed to keep our political opinions to ourselves, to ask questions, and to listen. This was to be an exploration of our common humanity.
I spoke with a number of mothers who were raising kids alone on the base while their husbands fought in Vietnam. They were painfully conflicted about the morality of the war, terrified that their husbands might be injured or killed, and felt as though they were pawns in a horrible game of global politics. I learned a lot about the complexity of life and the ambiguities of politics that day. There are no easy answers, no obvious right or wrong positions.
I recently came across an essay by the Italian physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli, called “My 1977 and That of My Friends.” The year 1977 was the height of student protests in Italy. Rovelli says that for some of his contemporaries, that year “has become an almost mythical time. It was a moment of intense dialogue, of dreams, enthusiasm, yearning for change, of longing to build together an alternative and better world.”
The idealism of the “Movement of 1977” was dealt a debilitating blow when student protesters and police clashed in the city of Bologna. To everyone’s shock and grief, a student named Francisco Lorusso was shot and killed by a police officer. Another young person killed for the crime of demanding a better world.
The dreams of young activists around the world at that time were perhaps naive and unattainable. Rovelli recalls “envisaging a world without private property, without envy or jealousy, without hierarchy, without churches, without powerful states, without atomistic closed family units, without dogma.”
Rovelli asks rhetorically, “Was it futile to have dreamed at all?” He does not think so, because the dreams, he says, “fertilized the ground from which our lives grew.” And the lives of people around the world have improved. The seeds of democracy and equality have taken root and spread throughout the world. They have yet to flower in many places—or have flowered and been cut back—but the root systems are there waiting for the right conditions to burst forth.
The power of visionary dreams, Rovelli says, is that they teach us that the kind of world we have is not the only world possible. Our current reality is not the only possible reality. We can, and must, continue to imagine a world without war, without poverty, without vast inequalities of wealth, without caste divisions and oppression. And we must convert those dreams into realities.
I have one quibble with Rovelli’s language. I don’t think we need to dream of a better “world.” It’s hard to imagine a better world than planet earth. Earth is a miraculous place. Where else can we find water, oxygen, chlorophyll, trees, fruit, and such diversity of animal life. The life of our world is amazing and wonderful in its exuberant fecundity and diversity.
What we need to visualize is a better form of humanity, an evolved version of Homo sapiens. We need to imagine human beings who, as a species, can overcome greed, selfishness, and the impulse to exploit the wonders of nature. We need to imagine and become a species with deep compassion, respect and awe for the miracle of life, one that is humble and responsible about its place in the delicate and fragile web of life.
Toward the end of The Tempest, Prospero decides to abandon his magical abilities so that he and his daughter can rejoin normal society.
But this rough magic I here abjure,
. . . I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Unlike Prospero, we elders of the realm must maintain whatever magic we still possess. We should wield the power of our dreams to spin moral and ethical visions of the better people we know we and our neighbors can become. We need to keep nudging the arc of history toward greater freedom, equality, and benevolence. We need to encourage Homo sapiens to evolve into a gentler and kinder inhabitant of our amazing planet earth.
Michael C. Patterson had an early career in the theater, then worked at PBS, developing programs and systems to support the educational mission of public television. Patterson ran the Staying Sharp brain health program for AARP, then founded MINDRAMP to continue to promote physical well-being and mental flourishing for older adults. He currently explores these topics on his MINDRAMP Podcast and his Synapse newsletter. His website is www.mindramp.org.
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