I Want to Know What Happens Next

Something's going to happen next week, or next year, that will completely change the story.

Maybe it'll be an earthquake -- a literal one, the 7.8 that seismologists are urgently warning Californians to get ready for, and a figurative Big One that divides millions of people's lives into Before and After.

Or maybe it'll be a "what were we thinking?" moment, like the bursting of the housing bubble, that retroactively connects the economic dots into a saga about human folly.

Or maybe, God forbid, it'll be an assassination, or an act of nuclear terrorism, or the melting of the polar ice cap, some catastrophe in whose revisionist hindsight today's Cassandras will be seen as Paul Reveres.

On the other hand, maybe it'll be something good that happens to rewrite the narrative.

It might be the passage of a health care bill that breaks the hammerlock of the insurance industry, a feat that transforms the president from a hapless victim of bipartisan delusions into a patient master of three-dimensional chess.

It might be a public awakening that forces Food, Inc. to do what Big Tobacco did, a horrified collective realization that makes those delicious ads for sugar, fat and salt as preposterous and scarce as the ones with doctors touting the health benefits of cigarettes.

Or it could be the arrival of a message from another galaxy, requiring us to relinquish beliefs that have caused our species so many wars and so much grief. It could be a discovery about the nature of matter that scrambles our idea of reality and makes scientists take mysticism seriously. Or it could be the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.

The desire to know what's going to happen next, the need to fit things into a narrative, is as deep a human drive as sex. We spend our lives telling our autobiographies to ourselves, constantly revising them to include, and make inevitable, the latest twists and turns. When life throws us randomness, we look for patterns. When something hits us out of the blue, we look backward for portents and clues. When changes disrupt our stories, we recast them as chapters, turning surprises into segues and ruptures into reveals.

Suspense is a great motivator. There are aged people, and sick people, who hang on to life not only because they love and are loved, and not just because they may be scared of death, but also because they are consumed by the dramas playing out in the world. They demand another day to see how things turn out. They want to know the ending. And because the ending is a receding horizon, they insist on staying in the game.

That's true, of course, for the young and the healthy as well. We go to fortune tellers, read our horoscopes, and cast the I Ching not so much because we want to know what lottery numbers to play, but because we're as curious about the plot as the little girl in the Doris Day song:

I asked my mother, what will I be?
Will I be pretty, will I be rich?...
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead.
Will we have rainbows, day after day?...
Now I have children of my own.
They ask their mother, What will I be?
Will I be handsome, will I be rich?

"Que Sera Sera" is a lousy answer. We need to know. That's why crowds in New York mobbed the ship from England bearing the latest installment of Dickens's serialized novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, with shouts of "Is Little Nell dead?" Networks can charge $3 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad because "whatever will be will be" is ridiculous advice. Sheherazade escaped the fate of the three thousand wives beheaded before her because she never finished a story, instead shrewdly nesting one new tale within another. Each night, when dawn came and the King asked her whether the forty thieves will manage to kill Ali Baba, or if Sinbad will be eaten by the rocs, or what will happen when Aladdin's mother rubs the lamp, imagine what would have happened to her neck if Sheherazade had answered, Who cares?

The future's not ours to see -- except, alas, that we all die. This week, in the annual ten-day interval between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews around the world are asked to simulate the experience of their own demise. I hate the idea of my own mortality, for all the obvious reasons. But add to them a ferocious reluctance to turn out the lights without knowing whether Sarah Palin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are finally going to get what's coming to them.

This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.

Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan

Comments

[ponderman]

I just hope to be around on December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar runs out. I have a feeling
that nothing will happen except the same old crap.

[lastpost]

“The desire to know what's going to happen next”

Would working on ways to ensure human continuation, tend to increase or decrease our chances of being around to see what happens next?

Then while we busy ourselves doing that, there might be far less time for idle minds to find ways in which to act against themselves.

[PhilipB]

What a brilliant and thoughtful post. I loved it.

[fairwitness]

Knowing that the narrative we are continually creating is itself partial, leaves out most of what happens and is ultimately false--is liberating...at least liberating from the false.

Now, finding the true is another matter. But the mind's need to square things away and look away from uncertainty is a kind of stupidity--or myopia. And fear precipitates reactionary, defensively aggressive modes which create more chaos than they avoid.

Ever wonder if it's possible to really be awake and functioning as best a human being is able? What would that be like? If you suddenly forgot everything you thought you knew and yet remained perceptive and somewhat intelligent...then what?

[MinerSam]

With the empowerment of the least informed among us --- in the usual Republican activity (their only skill and one they thrive upon) to deceive people into voting for their defective products, and againest their very own interests -- right now, if our communications pipelines continue to be poisoned it looks like we are heading for a civil war.

[SeaBlood]

Where I currently am, today was rainy. That's supposed to be a good omen.

[SquealingPig]

Ahhhh . . . give em a pain pill and send them Home, . .. per the Messiah
now that's Compassion . . . Govment Style . . . yeah I know government, Almighty GOVMENT

[PlaceboStudman]

Now, now, we can't forget giving everyone their Godgiven human/civil right to Viagra, Botox and Rogaine!

[PlaceboStudman]

What will happen next? In today's society of greed and corruption, we will reach a point where the fights and struggles that we have faced will simply not be enough, and we will want more, more, more and because we believe we won the last battle, we will continue the same battle over and over again, not realizing there are other fights to fight.

Take the Health Care (and I use that term loosely) debate. We will get a bill that satisfies no one except for a few priveledged elites who never had to worry about life and death issues in the first place, and we will realize that this reform of Health Care did as much (or as little depending on your perspective) as every other past attempt at reforming Health Care, and this will not be satisfying, because we never fully realized we were fighting the wrong fight.

Take for example the statistic that is often cited that 45.000+ people die each year from lack of care due to lack of insurance. Well, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) quotes that 106,000 people die from unexpected consequences and adverse reactions to the drugs they are getting. And those are people who presumably HAVE insurance.

If nearly double the number of people who are dying are dying because of the quality of care they receive (106,000) than from lack of care (45,000), do we really want to add people who are dying from lack of quality?