We can do better...

We should do better.

It's a little strange that at the age of 70, after several decades of making a living as a writer, it just this week dawned on me that there's been a common theme to almost all my work.

My syndicated column, Independently Speaking, has been running for nearly 30 years, and while it's been given awards for editorial comment, humor, and journalism, a repeating theme is the desire to be better. A better husband, father, citizen...you name it.

The cumulation of this is the best thing I've ever written. My alternative history Between the Helpless and the Darkness, started out with the working title of A Happy Ending for the World. As a journalist I've filed stories from twenty countries, and I've seen plenty of room for improvement. The last chapter of the manuscript popped into my head more or less complete while I was selling nachos at a girl's high school basketball game but it took nearly twenty years to bring the project to fruition.

The book is, for lack of a better word, a stew of the experiences that make me...me. I grew up on a farm on the western edge of Minnesota, which before Europeans plowed it up was the transition between the tall grass and short grass prairies of the Great Plains. I've had a number of Dakota friends in my life, and while as individuals they are just as wonderful and screwed up as any other example of humanity, I found much to admire in their culture, particularly their culture pre-contact with Europeans, which led me to study the rich variety of Native cultures.

Another ingredient is that most of my ancestors came from Norway, and I grew up reading about the exploits of the Vikings.

The final ingredient was my life long fascination with history, politics and figuring out what works.

Where did all that lead?

Knowledgeable people are willing to say that our Constitution borrows quite a bit from the League of the Iroquois, a confederation of Native Americans in the northeast. A thousand years ago Scandinavian culture gave a great deal of power and autonomy to women. And, to any serious reader it's hard to dispute that most of the evils in the world come from the actions of men and in particular ambitious, greedy men. Many of the evils of colonialism come about not because of the clash of cultures, but because the clash is accompanied by a disparity in power.

Dream of what could have, might have been, and bada bing, bada boom, there's a book. Turns out you can fix the world, you just have to have a 1,000 year head start.

Harald Hardreda was a real person whose biography would defy fiction. Carried off his first battlefield at 14 he made his way through what is now Russia to the Byzantine Empire where he become a member of the Emperor's personal bodyguard. He accumulated vast wealth, returned to Norway, won the title of King of Norway and died in 1066 while invading England.

What if he hadn't died? What if he'd been carried off that battlefield wounded near unto death. With all ambition and greed burned from his soul what if he'd led his followers westward, following in the footsteps of other Scandinavian explorers until he sets foot on what is now Nova Scotia. Lacking the advantages of guns and germs like later explorers he would have needed to work together with the native inhabitants to forge a new vision, not a conquest but a collaboration, leading to something greater than the sum of its parts.

It is, of course, a work of fiction, written to entertain, but also to make you think. We cannot change the past, but it's within our power to learn the lessons of the past moving forward.

We can do better.

https://www.kirkhousepublishers.com/brentolson