I’d like to be thinking and writing about CEQA, or museums. I’d like to be writing about downtown, the university, housing, neighborhoods, local culture and all the rest. I’d like to engage in business as usual, and think about anything but the damage and danger that is spreading across the world right now. I doubt I’m alone.

For some time now I’ve been engaged in an uneasy conversation with a dead man, Walter Benjamin. A darling of late-stage academia, Benjamin died in the first year of the last big war in Europe. He was — as one of his in-laws, Hannah Arendt, observed — a philosopher who wrote poetry and a poet who philosophized. The world has been trying to unravel his thoughts ever since he took his life while fleeing the Nazis.

Walter Benjamin was a narcissist. I know that because I once tried being friends with someone just like him. A lot of bad things can be said about that bunch, but placing oneself at the center of the universe sometimes affords one a unique perspective. Benjamin once bought a monoprint from the artist Paul Klee and, being a narcissist, he chose his own title for it, calling the little wide-eyed figure “Angela Novus,” the Angel of History.

That angel, to Benjamin’s eye, was being pulled backwards, sucked into the future. I can remember a family station wagon with a fold-up seat in the back; we kids had a great view of where we’d been, but not where we were going. Likewise, Benjamin’s angel could only see the mounting carnage of history piling up at his feet as he was dragged helplessly into the future. Exiled from Berlin, sitting in Paris as the Germans closed in, I’m sure he felt the same.

These days I check the news hourly, watching history unfold almost but not quite as it happens. Both present and future feel like done deals to me now, the inevitable consequence of wasted opportunities and assumed stabilities. Opposition seems anachronistic, tie-dyed, nostalgic, maybe even feudal, arcane, eerily irrelevant. As if we’ve all been looking backwards. But I was trained to look forward, toward the future; that’s been my practice for half a century.

What strikes me, what leaves me nearly breathless, is the complete lack of imagination in the machinations of contemporary tyrants. We are living the very past that our parents — the Greatest Generation — fought to protect us from. If you doubt that for a moment, read “Mein Kampf.” That’s their dusty playbook, word for word. Detention camps, concentration camps; the doubletalk seems endless. Have we forgotten, or did we ever know that the first inmates of Hitler’s camps were not Jews, Gypsies or gays. They were political opponents and journalists. And, had the invasion of Russia succeeded, Slavs would have been on the next train. It doesn’t stop until it’s stopped.

A hundred years ago, Arendt observed that, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” We’re on that threshold now.

Back in her day, the opposition debated endlessly: reform or revolution. The debate itself became divisive and that division, amplified and exacerbated, served as justification for a police state, just as it was spelled out in “Mein Kampf.” All we have now are our hearts and minds, our love and our imagination. That ought to be enough.

Everyone is worthy of respect. No one’s suffering should be denied, neither should it be appropriated or taken advantage of by others. It starts and ends there. I’m no saint, but that much seems obvious. And the only question for each of us is, do we have the ability to think and the courage to act? Do we have fortitude, compassion, resolve and love enough to, as the saying sorta goes, let good speak with our lips? I know that many in my community do, and I hope to stand with them. Good luck to us all.

Mark Primack would like to hear from you at mark@markprimack.com.