MUSINGS AND MISHAPS

Author: Lindsey Whitton

We live in a culture obsessed with the question "What If?" What if you had chosen a different college or girlfriend? What if he had not gone to work on Sept. 11? What if we won the lottery tomorrow? What if we could change the past, or anticipate the future? We torture ourselves and others, fascinated with, as Robert Frost once wrote, "the road less traveled."

Some of this musing is the product of living with so many options and with so much bounty. We are a nation that has never stopped seeking the frontier, unsure whether we were driven by a quest for a better future or a fearful escape from the past. We are a people confident that tomorrow we can do it better or find a 12-step program to patch up all transgressions. We are a generation of high achievers, raised by parents who think we are a bit more special than anyone really is. We are accustomed to getting our way, to living a pretty good life, and to making a splash. But we are also a culture of worriers: what if, what if, what if.

I spent a semester in South Africa when I was 16. Nothing could have prepared me for the immensity of that country's beauty and tragedy. In some ways the teenagers who became my close friends were like American teenagers. But on a profound, deeper level, South Africans are different. For they did not seem to ask "what if?" They did not share the American obsession with pre-planning a life, measuring the odds. Despair, destruction and indescribable beauty are so interwoven into their cultural fabric that a certain air of fatality permeates every facet of society.

We drove along a country road between the undulating sugar fields and the Indian Ocean, with an enormous orange moon hovering on the horizon. An emaciated cow wandered onto the highway. We swerved, the old car swaying precariously like a pendulum. I stifled a scream, but the driver and other passengers, lifelong South Africans, continued their conversation without a pause.

I lay in my room with my roommate Marisa, and heard gunshots four stories below. Marisa kept talking, her cadences rising and falling around the commotion outside. "Things happen here," she would tell me.

I stumbled, one night, over a small heap outside a Cape Town restaurant. It was a tiny boy. He was perfect, asleep and alone. "We can't stop, he probably has AIDS, there are so many of them," my friends said. I went on. What if I had stopped?

America is now a nation wondering about tomorrows. But may we never stop asking, "What if?"