Length of view

A graphic phrase describing a valuable commodity: length of view.

On the NPR the other day they were talking about the 40th anniversary of what’s come to be called the Tate/Labianca murders. It came up because one of the women who “did it” is dying of cancer and coming up for parole, much like the recently released Libyan Lockerbie inmate.

If you’re too young to remember the murders, google Charles Manson and Helter Skelter. In the middle of the Summer of Love (’69), a Los Angles sociopath convinced some of his followers that murdering important people in the LA area, in a particularly brutal fashion, would spark of a race war that would change the world.

Looking back, you wonder how it could happen. But I remember that summer, and it wasn’t as hard to imagine in that context.

When you’re in the middle of something, it looks and feels very different. Getting to a sane outcome may depend on finding a way to lengthen the view.

Another example: I got angry at someone in my office last week and stomped off—I was totally inappropriate. But in that moment, I couldn’t find a way to think or feel that was not a bit unhinged.

Now there’s nothing unusual about getting irritated, happens all the time for the best of reasons and worst. But throwing a mini-tantrum is, when you look back on it the next morning, kind of humiliating. I called and apologized.

I only bring it up because it took until the next day for me get far enough away to see that I didn’t like what I’d done.

Length of view: we really could use some right now in the healthcare debate. Heat seems to be beating light.

Perhaps the health and humanity of a time, culture, group, family, personality ... whatever, can be partially measured by how rapidly it/they typically create and apply length of view.