In the spring of 1991, I was beginning to accept that my life really was turning around for the better. For two years, my life had been on a downward spiral, bottoming out about as far as can be imagined. As I began to believe that I would survive, I started to hear this song called "Right Here, Right Now", by a band called Jesus Jones. Watch and listen:
With its sly digs at Tracey Chapman and Prince, its peppy tempo, a hook that gets you bobbing and smiling, and references to the world waking up from history, it gets you moving and remembering the sense of possibility in those days when the Cold War ended.
The period from the spring of 1989, when Poland announced multi-party elections, Hungary opened its borders to Austria, and China teetered on the brink (the one sad moment in a year of triumphs against repression) until the day in August of 1991 when the classical radio station in Washington broke in to a string quartet with "Back in the USSR" to announce the collapse of the coup attempt in the Soviet Union were times both heady and awful. I remember crying as I watched the East Germans dance on the wall. I remember how swift it all was - and its seemed to move from north to south. First Poland, then East Germany, Hungary, Romania's short, bloody revolution, Bulgaria's communists voting themselves out of office before they ended up a bloody pile on the evening news a la the Ceaucescu's. Even as my personal life spiraled out of control, crashed and burned, then started to right itself again, these events seemed so bizarrely wonderful (yes, I know, I used an adverb; you can't kill 'em all) that I couldn't help feeling good.
By the spring of '91, things were much better personally. Even with the invasion of Panama in '89 and the first Gulf War, I thought that things really were different. I would hear this song on the radio and it would hit me, again - all the noise and threats and deaths and . . . it was over. It seemed to me the possibilities were boundless. It was more than mere optimism. It was hope. Hope contains all the contradictions of life and transcends them with an "even so . . ." that makes no sense except for the person who expresses them. It recognizes tragedy, but looks forward to comedy. It acknowledges evil, but refuses to give it the last word. It suffers, but refuses to collapse in self-pity.
Living as we do today, could anyone write or sing a song as full of hope and joy at the end of history as this? Will we, one day, sing songs of awakening from this nightmare in which we live right here, right now?
