ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 19, 1996 TAG: 9601190021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
THE FRENCH, as they always do, have a term for it: fin de siecle. It means "end of the century," that peculiar short time when we judge the century we've lived in and wonder what the next one will bring. The term conveys weariness and a certain hopelessness about the future.
We're a little more than five short years away from the 21st century. As we look back, 1995 appears strangely different from 1895, but there are some eerie similarities as well as some profound differences.
When the l9th century was drawing to a close, Queen Victoria had reigned in England for almost 60 years. No one person or political group has ruled for anything like that length of time in our own century, unless one considers the rise and fall of the Communist Party in Russia.
In 1895, great railroads, industrialization and the magical inventions of Thomas Edison marked American life, but wars, both military and economic, loomed ahead.
Less than 20 years away was a modern-day shot that would be heard around the world, the bullet that would assassinate in Sarajevo a minor Austrian ruler, leading to World War I. Today the United States and NATO are seeking to keep the most fragile of peace agreements in that baffling land of tribal hatreds.
Whether the Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims will be any more peaceable to one another in the future than they have been for the past 600 years is a question that doesn't inspire much optimism. And pessimism, after all, is another fin de siecle characteristic.
The threat of war, economic disaster, pollution, and a dozen other social and ecological ills have frayed the fabric of 20th century life.
Today we face AIDS, not the plague, crack cocaine in every town large or small, not the opium dens of exotic cities from past centuries. Other eras confronted death and starvation, disease and the cruelty of war, of course. It's just that with all our modern technology, Americans in particular feel that life should be healthier and more humane than in those more ignorant times.
For all our scientific advances and heightened social concern, are we really doing any better, for instance, struggling with the issues of abortion and the rights of the unborn and the dying?
A fin de siecle example from the late 1700s, an era of idealism and revolution in France and America, was the epidemic of suicides following the publication of Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther."
Young Europeans killed themselves by the dozens in sympathy for the title character. It is hard to find a common ground between those romantically idealistic deaths and the pragmatic suicides of today's terminally ill. Goethe and Dr. Kevorkian seem literally worlds as well as centuries apart.
We have only five brief years to work on some very thorny problems before a new century and a new millennium rush in like one of those high-speed Japanese electric express trains. We are all surely long past being naive enough to believe we'll solve more than a very few of the world's dilemmas by the year 2000.
If, however, we can avoid terminal apathy, that end-of-the-century malaise, then we can get a head start on the brave new world that lies ahead of us and its not-at-all-new problems being dealt with by not entirely brave people.
Jesus, Buddha and most of the other great religious and intellectual thinkers throughout history have advocated a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work approach to those problems. There are more than enough causes to go around for everyone.
We can all give more of ourselves, our time, and our money; write more letters (or send more e-mail); and try to work for more understanding of one another and our individual differences in order to find a common ground for solving problems and resolving conflicts.
It may not seem like much in this complicated world, where every action seems to cause some negative reaction or make a complex issue even more complex, but this is where we start, if we haven't already. This is how we try to make the world safer for our children, while fighting to save both our present century and perhaps also the one to come.
Lois Lanier lives in Pulaski County, where she is a volunteer tutor.
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Nancy Ohanian/LATimesby CNB