People's endless struggles to change their lives
Change, when it was constant and fairly manageable, used to be called progress. At the deepest point in the Depression, Chicago held a 1933 World's Fair gamely celebrating "The Century of Progress." The slogan was forgivably boosterish then, but now change is regarded far more neutrally. The word describes not merely the advances but all the tumults, the violence, the wrenching readjustments of our era. Even necessary change has its costs, for as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "It is the first step in wisdom...