Visiting Old Friends Can Bring New Insight

This post might start out looking like an aside, but I will tie it into the blog topics.  Just thought a little background might help place it in context.

We [my entire family] love to read!  You would realize that if you ever visited my home and saw the 4 overstuffed bookcases in our dining room (my wife's office), the three others (also overstuffed) in my basement, and the three (not quite overstuffed) in my basement office.  If you wander through the house you will see books tucked and piled up in all sorts of places.  No, we aren't one pile away from an episode of Hoarders . . . well everywhere except my office.  In addition to the several thousand actual books, My daughter and I several hundred e-books from Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and generic sources between us.  Needless to say my family certainly loves reading.

One of my friends finds it strange that I not only like reading, but re-reading.  He is an avid reader as well, but uses the local library much, much more than any bookstore.  He finds it hard to believe that I re-read books, especially fiction.

To me, re-reading a book is like visiting an old friend.  For example, I have read 'The Lord of the Rings' so many times I had to replace my original paperback copies with hardbacks and I think I am getting close to replacing those due several decades of wear and tear.  They were the only books that accompanied me on my one-year assignment to the Republic of Korea (of course, I came home with a suitcase full of new friends).  I love re-reading books.

Yes, this is leading up to something related to the main topics of this blog.

Recently, I re-read 'Friday' by Robert Heinlein.  It's a classic originally published in the early 1980's.  What I enjoy about visiting old friends is that I frequently see something I hadn't seen before or see something in a very different light than when I last read it.  The reason is simple, I am not the same person I was in 1982 when I first read Friday.  I'm also not the same person at any point in the past when I re-read the book.  Here is a quote from a very brief point in the book, a small part of a conversation between two characters:

" “. . .Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
“Really?”
“Pfui, I should have forced you to dig it out for yourself; then you would know it. This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength.” " (Friday: Robert A. Heinlein, 1982)

At the time I simply took this as nothing more than a plot device.  One of those things presented by the author as a foregone conclusion that moves the story along.  I really didn't give it much thought.  Even in the years since and the multiple times I re-read the book, this passage didn't strike me as significant.  It's been several years and the other evening I picked it up and this passage struck me!  Look at the things going on today!  Tell me it doesn't ring with you as well?

Personal rudeness has become the norm.  People who aren't part of your group are ignored or looked down upon.  People are often inconsiderate about major and minor matters.  For example, I do not believe there is a war on Christmas!  When someone wishes me a Happy Hanukkah or a Merry Kwanzaa, I simply take it in the spirit it was intended and thank them.  I have been watching more and more people go ballistic over a simple Merry Christmas.  Or the server who called everyone "Honey!" out of decades of habit -- nearly got struck in a restaurant when a patron objected in an almost violent manner.  These are such minor things, but too many people expand them into reasons to be insulted and even fight.

Then they like to band together with other like-minded people, using those others to reinforce their own prejudices.  It's not just the conservatives, although they do come to mind pretty easily.  But many other groups are doing the exact same thing.  

As I've said before, when it comes to religion I do believe you have the right to believe what you wish, but I expect the same courtesy for my beliefs -- or lack of them.  I feel that way in many things.  If you want to hang a Confederate Flag out your window, be my guest, but not only do you not have to right to demand I hang one out of my window, if I hang a different flag I expect you to not whine about it.  That's freedom to me!

But we don't have that freedom today.  People take exception of anything and everything that doesn't align with their own belief set and expect the rest of the people around them to not only accept their beliefs, but adopt them.  And when they don't, out come the lawyers sniffing blood.  What happen to mannerly disagreements or acceptance of our differences?  

That's why the passage from 'Friday' hit me so hard today.  I was struck by what's been happening politically today.  Not just here in the US with a certain hamster-haired serial liar and misogynist, but with every day people around the world.  The divisiveness between nearly every group, the intolerance of any viewpoint other than their own, and the absolute certainty in the righteousness of that viewpoint has become the norm rather than the exception.

To often they cling to those beliefs, convincing themselves that their belief set is the only thing saving them from an uncertain future.  But . . . are we a sick or dying culture?  Of course, you have to think about just what is American culture?

To examine this, here is the last part of a speech by a character in the HBO show 'The Newsroom'.  I'll link to the video at the end of this post.  But I want you to look at this first:

"We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn't belittle it; it didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore." (Will McAvoy, The Newsroom)

Listed in that speech are many of the things we have often self-identified as the things that make us Americans, I underlined a few.  But do they still hold true?  I hate to look at it like this, but the reality is we don't live up to those ideals any more.  Instead of celebrating our diversity and the strength and perspective it brought us, now we fracture America on those, and many other, lines.  We huddle together within those differences and build an illusion that by clinging to those differences we are the stronger.  The challenges of the past could not, would not, be met by today's Americans.  I think the question is not meeting the challenges of the of the past, but can we really meet the challenges of the future?

Not heading down the road we appear to be on.  Every time we denigrate other Americans, or any other people, we go further along the road that our past selves would have not taken.  Did we make mistakes in the past, most certainly.  But we were on the way to resolving many of those.  Not instantly, but as we recognized them, we were trying to addressing them.  But today labels are used to further divide us and prevent any forward motion on real issues.  The labels become the issue.  Every time I hear a conservative cry 'snowflake' it further drives a wedge between people and instead of dealing with the issues that have caused division, we tend to slap a label on it and try and ignore it.  "The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one." You can't solve a issue by just labeling it.

We are certainly no longer the culture we once were, the culture we like to convince ourselves we still are -- but we are not.  As a whole we have lost sight of the ideals that started this country.  Partisanship has become the norm, cooperation and acceptance is the exception rather than the rule.  That needs to change!

I repeat -- That Needs To Change!

Here is the whole of what has been often described as the best 3 minutes on television: