Darkness at Noon.

Many people, especially people of my generation or older (if there are any) are familiar with the phrase "The Dark Ages." 

The Dark Ages were a historical notion that after the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, about 670 AD, things got bleak(er) on earth. That science, art, love, curiosity, discovery, even laughter disappeared on earth and people went around essentially rooting for grubs and twigs to eat. The Dark Ages were said to have lasted for six or seven or eight hundred years, until the Black Death passed and the first green-shoots of the Renaissance took root.

That's pretty heavy for a blog on advertising. 

There are many today during our sad crypto-authoritarian era who are quick to say we are facing the prospect of a new Dark Age.

There are times, in my darker moments (which are not inconsiderable) when I entertain that tranche of thinking. Frankly, when information is "banned" and language is eliminated and truths go unspoken, it's hard not to fall prey to such a line of thinking.

But.

But.

But.

While historically, people of my generation grew up with the idea of the Dark Ages (when life, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, was "nasty, brutish and short") most historians today decry the notion of darkness.

Or, put another way, as a species the lights didn't simply turn off. Things didn't all-of-a-sudden get dark. There were lights. There always are. Even in the darkness, there was laughter, science, joy and art. Love.

It's easy today, both in the world and in our advertising, to see only Darkness. 

But it's wrong. And I've been wrong. 

It's too easy to be as I have too often been: negative and cynical.

It's important during the Bleak to find the shafts of light, the peals of laughter, the tentative touch of love, and signs of ever-lasting hope and life. It's important to, yes, point out the bad, but it's equally important--maybe more important--to celebrate the good. The fighters, the creators, the designers, the writers, the whimsy-ers, the non-compliant, the insouciant and celebrate those who make a difference, who fight back, who say, in Latin (my preferred language) or English or German, Etiam Si Omnes Ego Non. Even if all others, Not I. Ich Nicht. Not I.

I will be doing that more in this space.

Celebrating the good, not decrying the bad.

Help me.

Send me things that give us hope. That push back. That say, as Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech in 1949, that man(kind) will not only endure, we will prevail.

We need to do this.
We need to smile.
We need to point out the roses through concrete,
the force that through green fuse drives the flower.

Together we can do more than not go gentle into that good night.

We can make more good days.

Let's not despair.

Let's get to work.