Not knowing

I think unacknowledged confusion becomes rigidity.  To remain loose, you need to be able to say “I don’t know” on a pretty regular basis.  You need to remember you are guessing, that we all are guessing, and that past successes are no guarantee of future ones.

In important respects, this is the malady of the present day Left in America, the relics and residue of the 1960’s.  They were so sure they were right.  They were so sure that building a new world just required implementing simple ideas that were so OBVIOUS.

And in their hearts, they are bitterly disappointed.   And they blame us, the conservatives, precisely because most of them suspect, somewhere deep in their being, that we were right.  They realize that the family is not a dispensible non-necessity, that shared religious faith is vitally important, that love of country orients people in a direction of meaningfulness and sense of personal relevance and belonging.

All the plastic, shiny, tokens of “alterity”, of counter to our culture: most of them did more harm than good.  Yes, we are a consumer society which does a very poor job of squaring the tenuousness and shortness of our lives with the decisions we actually make.  There were and remain valid critiques, but none of this is easy or obvious.  It is all very confusing and strange. 

All of these people need to become younger than they were in the 60’s to grow up.  And the people who actually are young need to forget everything they think they know.