If you despair over the Kavanaugh hearing and what it might mean for the country, remember that the ideologies of the combatants are all equally vulnerable to one force.
Time.
The current participants in this grand clusterfuck of American society are also acting, if inadvertently, as teachers for the younger generations. These actors in the drama, be their name Pelosi, Feinstein, Kavanaugh, or Grassley, have so much invested in their positions that they cannot abandon the redoubts they now man, for to do so would be to give a lie to their positions, to ruin their reputations, to even lay waste to their families.
But the generations that follow them, that follow me (augh!), they don’t have those monstrous investments. They can still evaluate, with grave honesty and reference to the ideals deduced throughout the centuries, the actions taken by both sides. The current conservative movement members indulge in grand mendacity over the last decade? That’s a big black mark. The progressives are terribly intolerant, giving birth to the violent antifa movement, and otherwise alienating their fellow countrymen? That’s another big black mark.
Those teachers, and the rest of us, are not role models, but rather examples of the outcomes caused by our ideological choices, and those results are on NEON FUCKING DISPLAY in Washington for some of us.
All the youthful generations need to do is pay sober, long attention, and to remember that box of choices from which they draw is not a blind draw, only somewhat occluded, and contains far more choices than the two dominant ideological positions of today. They need to remember that, if you want it to be an effective choice, it means you’ll have to join up with others, either formally or informally, and that those you work with won’t be perfect, just as you aren’t. The trick is not to demand perfection, nor is it to tolerate imperfections, but to determine which imperfections are deal-breakers, which can transformed into virtues, and which ones, like bad hairlines, must merely be tolerated. Those may be personal, singular choices, but in the aggregate they shape society; making these determinations are the essence of justice.
I encourage them to question every assumption that has applicability to these and future political debates, from being of conservative or liberal temperament to the wisdom of adhering to any religious sect, or to choose to be an atheist, and to be aware that the latter case leaves one with hard choices concerning morality and philosophy that are not always faced by religious adherents – but both religious adherents and atheists have brought fear and suffering upon the innocent, and, worse, not through any malicious intent.
One day they’ll be in charge, dealing with problems of ecological degradation, national aggression, and other issues endemic to the severely over-populated world in which we live. For those who believe we’re on the edge of societal polarization and ruin today, as the final Kavanaugh vote is unexpectedly delayed a week for an FBI investigation, remember that the sweeping hand of time will brush these fugitive issues from us, and leave to our successors the responsibility of wise and skillful governance. Just as any despair for the foolishness of today will be swept away, so will that foolishness.
May they do better than us.
