In Or Out

I grew up in Texas, and summers are hot here.  Hotter recently than I remember they used to be, but that's for Al Gore and climate change deniers to argue out.  When I was young I would stand in the doorway, cool air from the inside hitting my back and hot air from the outside washing over my front.  And my mother would say 'in or out, make up your mind.'
  I'm sure my experience is practically universal.  In or out, but not stuck in between.  You can say that about a lot of things, crossing the threshold is more than a motor skill it's a metaphor.  Going from being a child to being an adult,* or from being single to being married, or from a non-parent to a parent.  Thing is, this metaphor doesn't just apply to people, it applies to societies too.
  I was doing some research for a new novel, one where the idea of boundary space and thresholds plays a very large role, and I came across some research by anthropologists regarding exactly that topic as it relates to cultures.  It's called liminality, from the Latin word for boundary or threshold or space in between spaces.  It's fascinating, if decades old research, about how societies shocked by crisis - usually wars - are forced to move beyond what they were before and become something new.  They cross the threshold and give up what they had been in favor of what they could be.**  These researchers were writing in the 60's and were fervently anti-Communist, and their argument was that for the Soviet Union the Second World War never ended, their society was stuck in permanent liminality.  After 1945 the Communist leadership kept their people in a state of perpetual crisis and held their entire society in the doorway - neither in nor out, not the old Tsarist regime or a new non-Communist state - to the detriment of every citizen.
  Now, a moment of reflection will let anyone realize that the exact same thing can be said of the United States, that the Second World War never really ended, the battlefield just changed.  The Cold War was just a decades-long perpetuation of the circumstances of the Second World War.  We were neither in nor out ourselves, we'd never really fixed the economic or social problems brought about by the Depression, we just spent our way into consumerism designed to distract us from the underlying decay.
  And when the Cold War ended in 1989, what happened?  Almost immediately a new war, Desert Storm, 1991. And new fake prosperity with the Dot Com bubble.  And when that bubble burst, as they all eventually must, what happened?  Yup... another war.  Another two wars, actually.  And another bubble, this time with real estate, all three at the same time.
  American society in the 20th Century has been in a constant state of crisis, the societal equivalent of the teen acne years, neither the old, pre-technical boom-and-bust society of the late 19th Century nor a society or economy much farther along than we were in 1938. Neither in nor out, but standing paralyzed in between.
  This, I think, is the new challenge.  We need to step through the doorway, we need to cross the threshold.  We absolutely cannot step backwards, that's what Russia and the old Soviet states are doing right now and it's not working at all.  If we don't move forward we'll keep fighting the same old fights and running the same old repetitive treadmill as we have the past 60 years.  I don't know about you, but I'm tired of things the way they are, it's not really working for anybody, even for those who seemingly benefit the most.  We need to get to the next thing.  Soon.


* or being tried as one, anyway
** kind of the the Hegelian dialectic model, but 150 years more modern