A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 3 of 3. The Resolute Edition
In prior years I've put up a string of threads entitled Resolutions For Other People. I haven't done it every year, but I have quite a few times. My last one is here:
New Years Resolutions For Other People (and maybe some for everyone) 2020.
New Years' Resolutions for Other People. 2019 Edition
These fall largely into the category of satire, and like most satire there's an element of seriousness to it. This past year, 2020, however, has been altogether far too serious to really effectively delve into satire with. Some serious resolutions, on a societal and personal basis, are really needed now.
2020 has exposed some cracks in the fabric of Western society that have been there for a long time, at least since 1968, if not since 1939, or 1929, or perhaps 1917 (or maybe 1914). Spanning a long period of history for other reasons, it's pretty obvious that the depth of our societal strife is much, much deeper in terms of years and origins than the weekend pundits would have it. Something didn't suddenly go wrong during the Trump Presidency. Something was wrong a long time before that. Anyone who has experienced at least a half century has been able to see that unless they've chosen to blind themselves to it. Much of the "progress' that has been allegedly made in society has in fact been deeply retrograde. In some significant ways we're much closer in societal influences to the year 20 now than to the year 1920, and that's not good at all.
So, with this in mind, some resolutions. Yes, for other people, but also some individual, perhaps, down below.
Gravitas
1. 1968 didn't work out because the 1960s didn't.
When we hit 2018 we ran, along with retrospectives on 1918, some on 1968.
1968 was a pivotal year in the history of the West. Things were revolutionary in the true sense of the word because it was the year that smoldering revolutionary views of society harbored in the college age Baby Boomers, but dating back to revolutionary views that became deeply seated in some sections of society in the 1910s through the 1950s, busted out.
Well, like the French Revolution, that was all a big fat failure.
That doesn't mean that there weren't things that needed to be addressed, but a lot of the addressing was just a rich kids tantrum that he didn't get an extra slice of pie for desert and we've been paying for it in spades.
The 1960s were the decade in which the Boomers decided that none of the "conservative" values of any kind were correct and that none of them applied to them. Well, that was an ignorant approach to the world. And that was followed up by the "greed is good" 1970s in the same generation.
Overall, the generation that still in power in the Untied States, and still very influential in much of the West (although that's passing away with blistering speed in much of it) ripped down the ediface and then the structure of nearly everything. The edifices may have needed some stripping, but the structures were torn down without reflection.
I've long maintained that the generation that's up and coming, the ones that are below age 35 now, are much more like the ones born before the World War Two/Depression Era/Greatest Generation, than any since then. They've been left, however, without much structure. Of course, in some ways, the generation that fought World War One suffered through that as well.
Tennyson wrote that:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Well, sometimes the old order changes simply because its under assault. Here we have Tennyson's writings twice before us. The old order was attacked a bit too much, and what replaced it is now the old order and needs to go.
Chesterton noted;
There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
This doesn't mean that everyone who has reached the age of 50, and I have, needs to suddenly find an iceberg and float out to a watery demise. Far from it. But lots of what we reassessed in 1968 and the years that followed need to be reassessed as the results are a mess. The Sexual Revolution alone looks a lot like the French Revolution. . . a spectacular celebrated failure that sparked more spectacular failures. Celebrating the French Revolution is vicariously celebrating Stalin, Moa and Pol Pot. Celebrating the Sexual Resolution is pretty much just like that. And that's but one example.
2. Something old
It used to be the case, for some reason, brides were told they needed;
Something old
Something new.
Something borrowed
Something blue.
I don't know about that, but the entire society needs to try the first one, as we by and large don't know what works anymore. And by that, I mean something serious, and some things not so much.
What I more particularly mean is that everyone, and I'm serious about this, ought to look back prior to the Boomer generation and try something, and really try it, that your progenitors of that generation prior would have regarded as routine. Because this blog is directed at the faceless void, I don't know what that really means in your case.
In my own, that'd be pretty easy as my parents weren't Boomers. So for folks like me, I'd say go back one prior to that. I.e., if your parents were in the pre Boomer generation, look at least one back. If your parents are Boomers, look to the generation or generations prior to that.
And be at least partially serious.
Now, I know some people who think they've done this. Their great grandparents might avhe been immigrants from Poland, for example, so they've adopted Polish names for their newborn and they eat kielbasa on the Polish national holiday, whatever that is. And I in fact mean something sort of like taht. . . but more.
On the light side, that is what I mean. I don't care if you are a dedicated vegan. If your grandparents routinely had a hefty Sunday meal of roast beef, potatoes, and finished it off with coffee (and many people did just that), try it for a few weeks running.
Try it.
But beyond that, try something serious.
Did your grandparents always put in a garden? Put one in. Did one of them go fishing, and not in the weeny "catch and release" way, but in the "I'm eating that" way. Do it. Was one a farmer. . . think about farming if you can (which you probably can't, so put in a garden).
And beyond that.
Were your grand parents Italian immigrants and you think that you celebrate that heritage by having lasagna every now and then? You don't. Go to Mass for three months in a row. Were they Romanian? Well go to the Romanian Orthodox Church three months in a row or the Greek Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic one if you can't find one and see what that's like . . .seriously.
And are you living a life that your Italian grandmother would have regarded as an infamnia when she was 20. Well knock it and try to live like she did.
With all of this stuff, I think you'll find something. . . and something serious, real, and seriously real.
3. Reassessing the reassessment of retiring.
Over the past several years I've read endless articles in business journals and newspapers about how retirement is dead, nobody should retire, and isn't it nifty that people don't retire.
It isn't.
There tend to be only so many jobs in an economy and when they're occupied, they're occupied. It's different if you won the work, and professionals and business owners do, but otherwise, that's just not the case.
Additionally, there comes a time when there needs to be a shifting over, and we're now there. This past several months we saw Finland field a slate of candidates for their nation's chief executive who were all in their 30s with one exception who was in his 40s. That guy lost. In contrast, the United States fielded a slate of candidates that were sifted down to people in their 70s and 80s. That's insane.
People routinely complain about the American infrastructure being past its prime. Of course it is. The entire nation is vested in people who are past their prime in some ways. Even taking the most recent election, there's no earthly way that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden were the men they were twenty years ago.
At some point, this is getting dangerous if for no other reason that an entire society in the hands of people in their natural decline will be a country in decline. But it can be worse. So far the nation's been spared what will happen if we keep this up, which will be a President who descends into mental illness or a Supreme Court with more than one member who have Alzheimer's. It's inevitable.
Moreover, there's something wrong with a society in which people who have worked their entire lives can think of nothing else to do. Travel, if you still can. Write. Photograph. Become a Church reader or a Synagogue canter. Be more natural. Mehr Mensch sein.
4. Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
If you worked your entire life in Dayton, you owe the place something or at least you owe Ohio something. Don't pick up and move simply because you can when you retire your job at Amalgamated Amalgamated. If you hated Ohio, you should have left before then.
Okay, family ties, health, etc., all matter. And I don't have a problem with people moving from Craig to Ranger, or Riverton to Dubois, or Santa Fe to Taos. But we owe where we are from something and to have lived and worked in a region and then to pick up root when we retire and relocate does a double disservice. It deprives our community of what it gave us, both in resources and in knowledge, and it drops us in a place where we may very well be an economic and cultural menace.
If you retire from Giant Co in Illinois and then buy a farm in Nebraska as a hobby, some young farmer in Nebraska probably won't be able to get a start. If you wanted to be a farmer you should have tried it prior to that point. You get the picture.
And frankly, if you stick around and finally pass in your region, people remember you. And for a long time. If you pick up and move to Arizona, people forget you, and your obituary in the paper just brings a "I wonder who that was and why they're in our paper?". Don't fools yourself. You may have been a big lawyer at big law firm, but if you die some place distant, nobody is going to remember you.
5. Right, Left and all points in between.
Let's start here with "the Donald".
You lost the election, President Trump, and you need to accept that immediately.
You are doing a massive disservice to the nation by pretending otherwise.
And for those participating in this, its' hurting the country.
We are a democratic nation. We're not Weimar Germany. Denying the results of an election, even if it means that the person elected is somebody we detest, is detestable. It needs to stop.
And remember, if things devolve to them against us, there's always the chance that there's a lot more of them, then us.
Let's go beyond that, however, and really look at what's going on underneath and resolve to address it.
The country ended up with Donald Trump not because, as some lefties seem to think, 50% o the country is crazy. Rather, 50% is totally disenfranchised. That needs to be brought to an end.
Americans who defined what to be an American is up until Berkeley radicals suddenly determined they had the right to do that need to be heard from, and in a large way. And that means that the nation isn't going to become a "progressive" (and we'll get to that definition in a moment) petrie dish. The more that occurs the more the subjects of the experiment don't like it.
Indeed, the irony of the recent populist movement is that you really have to look outside the US to find analogous examples and they're all really disturbing. A good one is pre revolutionary Russia. Most Russians never became Communists and they certainly weren't in 1917. They were just sick and tired of a government that served only itself and they were happy to let it burn to the ground even if they were burned up in the process. That's sort of what's going on now.
The needs, desires and views of the Rust Belt demographic needs to be taken into account and given voice. If it isn't, this is going to keep on and get worse.
The left also needs to quit ignoring the actual views of various demographics they claim. The rise of real lefty ideas is very limited and the up and coming generations, including those concentrated in ethnic minorities, are much more conservative than they are. People being both, for example, against abortion and Hispanic isn't nuts, its the norm in that demographic. The left is going to have to change or it'll render itself irrelevant in a generation.
But before we leave that, those now in the diehard populist camp need to wake up and realize that they aren't the majority of Americans anymore. There's a lot of them, but the old assembly line manufacturing America is gone forever. In towns and cities people are more left wing and are a lot more accepting of a government role in everything. Not everything urbanites confront is invalid by any means, and populist are going to have to yield to that. That means that people need to quit screaming "socialism" every time the government is involved in something and frankly, as we transition into a new economy, the government's role in everything is going to increase enormously.
And conservatives and progressives need to figure out what the heck those labels mean. To be a conservative presumably means you are conserving something, but what? If its just the way things were, that's not going to work, as things were never the way that we think they were and some things move. Beyond that, somethings need to be dumped. So if its core values, it needs to be thought out. And part of that means adopting some things that conservatives in the US have seemingly never aligned themselves with. Conservatives, for example, ought to be conservationist. The same core value is at work. And if you are pro life, you ought to be pro vaccination, even if that means a strong element of government control in that. Conservatism isn't libertarianism, which is a completely different ethos.
Progressivism has an even bigger problem in that it suggests we're progressing towards something. If that's the idea, and I think it is, progressives need to be honest about that. Where are we progressing too. All too often its seems that concept of progress is rooted in a weird science fiction like world where through better chemistry and gene splicing, we'll make a brand new species. Most people don't want that, and for good reason.
Progressivism supplanted the world liberalism, or rather it returned. Progressives at one time were populist liberals like Theodore Roosevelt. Now they aren't. The term Liberal made more sense and I think it ought to return. To a certain degree the world lost favor as liberal came to essentially mean libertine, and government funded libertine, but that was more honest.
Anyhow, everyone ought to resolve to listen to the other side more. The simple fact is that if you are adopting your views because your party seems to hold them, or because Donald Trump does, or AoC does, you aren't thinking. No sane person can hold all the views that anyone party seems to.
One final thing here. Other than next week, this isn't going to be an election year, but none the less I'll give a voting resolution. Everyone, and by that I mean absolutely everyone, ought to find a third party candidate to vote for in the next election they vote in. Everyone. To not do so is to acquiesce to an anti democratic two party structure which is part of the overall problem.
6. Listen to Science.
I think I've posted this one before, but this year in particular has brought out some very odd developments in regard to the public's views on science.
I'm hearing a lot of people say they don't trust the science behind the vaccines. Okay, maybe you don't, but why? If it's not an informed basis, you should question your conclusion.
Now, that doesn't mean that a person should automatically accept everything that's currently a scientific theory. Even scientists don't do that. But it does mean that a person needs to weigh and measure their views against the appropriate yardstick. That yardstick is never "scientists are telling me something I don't want to hear".
All too often that's all it amounts to. We used to get a lot of that with cigarettes, but that's now pretty much gone away. We still get some with drinking in which people insist they can drink a gallon of beer a day or something like that. In some instances, as noted, and particularly it seems in regards to diets, there are good reasons to question the latest scientific stuff, but you should do so in a scientific fashion.
Americans have always tended to question science based on their politics when they mixed with fundamentalist Christianity, which is a uniquely American thing. In Europe, where Catholicism remained influential even where the Protestant Revolution forcibly supplanted it, the tradition of the Faith supporting science remains very strong. Catholics are huge on science and informed Catholics nearly always are everywhere, with the Catholic belief being that science serves to illuminate and explain God's creation. But in the US the trend in some regional sectors, and spreading over the country in the late 19th Century, was that everything had to be reconciled strictly to the Bible, with it unfortunately being the case that various Protestant theologians read some things into the Bible which actually weren't there, or which were based on erroneous translations, or which lacked nuance. That has caused the illusion in some quarters that science and religion are at odds with each other, which in fact they are not.
Beyond that, a decline in science education and funding following the Reagan Administration really hurt science education in the generation that immediately followed the Boomers, Generation X. The Baby Boomers were a large generation and the country didn't always do well in educating them, but up until Reagan came in there was a huge emphasis on science in education. Following him, there wasn't. This mean that subsequent generations, for a long time, had a poor foundation in science and engineering, with the subsequent result that we ended up having to import a lot of people in that category as we weren't generating our own.
Combined with the Boomer "let's rip everything down" impulse, this gave rise to popular bogosity. Dr. Oz says ridiculous stuff on television and people believe him. Jenny McCarthy, fresh out of prostituting herself in Playboy, has a baby and determines that vaccines, not genetics, caused the child to have Downs Syndrome. Patrick Coffin hosts wackadoodle pandemic conspiracy theorists on a show that started off on orthodox Christianity. Enough is enough.
The entire society is getting a lesson on science right now and we need to listen to scientists. Some of that means when somebody says something is wrong to outright question them if it is contrary to the scientific opinion. Retreating into "I heard" or something like that isn't a defense. I've heard, for example, that the new COVID 19 vaccines "change your physical makeup" and are "new". Neither of those is true in any meaningful scene, but you have to know the science a bit to know why that's not true. But then to make those statements you should know the science as well.
Part of this involves the uncomfortable realization that nobody knows everything about everything, and all of us too. Which gets me to the next thing.
7. Learn Some History
When the Internet first became widely used, some eternal optimist gushed about how everybody was now going to easily learn everything, including history. On the contrary, what really occurred is that vast amounts of bogosity spewed forth on everything including historical topics.
There are really good histories that are written by people who are not trained historians, but usually those same individuals are trained in something analytical. Rick Atkinson, for example, has a Masters in English and was employed as an analytical journalist before writing his popular histories. Barbara Tuchman had a BA in Arts from Radcliffe with a focus in literature and history. Lars Brownworth is a university educated historian who was a high school history teacher. Generally, when you find somebody writing good histories who isn't an academic historian, they're probably a 1) teacher, 2) writer from another discipline or 3) a lawyer, all of whom are trained in analytical research.
This used to be the source of raging debates between academic historians, who have traditionally tended to despise historians who come in from other disciplines. They still despise them. One academic historian who is employed by a university spends piles and piles of time on Twitter writing about about how awful her ex husband is and how great her boy friend is and crap like that, but still has time to take shots as historians who come in from other disciplines. But if ever academic historians have a point on this, and they do, the Internet has really proven it.
Since the Internet has come in people who believe in warped myth, the way the Germans believed that they'd been stabbed in the back in 1918, have had free reign to publish in that medium, and even simply publish, on their favorite myths. Unfortunately many people treat historical topics the same way that they treat a grocery list, only buying what they know they like. This has given rise to re revival of a bunch of real baloney of all sorts, a good example being that the Confederacy was about something other than keeping blacks enslaved. It wasn't, but there's all sorts of bull out there to the contrary. This has had a lot of really bad results over the past ten years, and right now its giving credence to the absurdity of the AG of Texas engaging in near sedition and suggesting that his trampling of the United States Constitution is supported by respect by the Constitution.
One of the things about real histories is that they not only keep us from repeating mistakes of the past, we learn what the errors of the past and views of the past really were. That is in part why historical works keep coming out on topics that have been written about before. As our distance increases from the times being written about, the body of knowledge that prior readers had on those topics fades. At the same time, not too surprisingly, people come into the topics today assuming that their beliefs found expression in prior times or that they're enlightened now as their beliefs were contrary to those held in prior times. Often neither assumption is even close to true.
A lack of historical knowledge has been cited by some in our society as a real problem my entire life. Most really well educated Americans on historical topics are at least to some degree self educated. Perhaps this didn't matter in less politically stressed times, but in politically stressed times this always really matters. Our culture needs a crash course in real history and every American ought to read some works of real history this year, and that doesn't mean some internet screed on a topic but a real book.
8. Quite listening to celebrities.
I've posted this before so I'm going to be brief, and frankly extreme. But I mean it.
If you became famous because you are an entertainer, you forfeited your seriousness card and nobody, and I do mean nobody, should listen to you on anything other than your field. That's it.
Nobody should care one whit what any celebrity says on anything serious matter, whether it be politics or science or a social matter. Staying famous is the stock and trade of celebrities and no celebrity is ever going to say anything that impairs that. Ever. If Nazi Dogs For Injustice became a big deal tomorrow, all celebrities would suddenly be Nazi Dogs For Injustice.
9. Don't take any political view, or news story view, from Twitter.
It's probably wrong.
10. Time to reassess late education.
This should be obvious now, but the education model we're working on, which is really the early 20th Century one modified by the post World War Two one, needs some serious rethinking.
This is likely a topic for another thread, but the current trend is to publicly fund university. The better argument is to defund a lot of what we're already publicly funding. We don't really need to fund students who are studying something "studies" and we certainly don't need to give student loans to law students. We do need to boost science and education funding.
This would mean, of course, that the Department of Departmental Largess in a lot of universities would fail and the department members would be wondering the streets trying to sell pencils while giving left wing advice to anyone who would listen, who would be nobody, while at the same time science and engineering departments, and more traditional departments like history, English, various languages and the like would prosper. They ought to. It would also mean that students would seem to have fewer options, but which would mean that they'd have more realistic ones.
11. First thing we do. . . .
No, not "kill the lawyers". But their number needs to be reduced as there's way too many.
This is party of the byproduct of what we noted in section 9 above, but it goes beyond that. Without getting into the American Default Degree, we can simply note that.
Since the 1970s this has had a hugely detrimental effect on American society, although we must note that just recently the courts really shined in defending democracy against an attempt at a coup through the courts. That doesn't take away from the fact that if you live in a society where any time you turn on a televisions you are confronted with an add asking if you took "x" and then later experienced anything, you might have a lawsuit, is fundamentally whacky. It's hurting things and this is a good time to reach in and saw off this limb.
It'd be easy to do. Simply quit giving student loans to law students. That would do a lot. But another thing would be to reinstate real bar exams instead of the moronic Uniform Bar Exam. That really needs to go an d ought to go by January 15, 2021.
12. Stop slandering everyone, including public figures you don't know.
An example from, of course, Twitter.
Well, "international best seller" author, a lot more people are aware of Sasse and respect him than will every read any of your books, none of which I've heard of, and all of which will be in the bargain bin of the library book sale within five years.
Stating something like this may pass for whit in the 21st Century, but it's awfully close to the infantile school yard taunts of the pre Internet age. It's easy to imagine Winslow running around with the old "I guess I'll go eat worms" playground chant after a thing like that, but there's a lot of that on Twitter.
Something Less Serious, which doesn't mean I don't mean it.
Well, alright then. A few things less weighty.
1. Enough with the tattoos already.
When I was young, as I've written before, having a tattoo meant: 1) you'd landed in the first wave at Iwo Jima, or 3) had been a prisoner in a Concentration Camp; or 4) had been a member of the SS and had your blood group tattooed on your arm; or 3) had been in the Vietnamese Marine Corps, or 4) you were a member of an outlaw biker gang.
I miss those days.
I'm sick of tattoos.
The novelty of tattoos is completely worn off. At this point, everyone who gets a tattoo should be required to get a tattoo of a sheep, as you're just joining the herd.
Expressing your individuality? Not hardly.
Additionally, one tattoo seems like the gateway drug for another. It's gotten so as soon as you see a tattoo pop out on a neckline or shirt line of a woman in particular, you should start looking for more. If they aren't there yet, they're going to be.
Enough already.
Unless you recently took shrapnel in the knee in Afghanistan or embarked on a religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land, you don't need a tattoo. You need not to have a tattoo. If you have some, be original. Get one removed.
2. Try some real clothing
Eh?
If I read one more article about "sustainable fashion" I'm going to scream. There's nothing sustainable about fashion unless it came from something that grew or crawled.
Give up that petroleum byproduct blouse or shirt and actually try something real. Give it a whirl. Your skin, and the planet, will thank you.
3. Skip the cartoon moves
Cartoon super heroes are infantile and watching them make you infantile. Don't go.
Want to see a move about Wonder Woman? There's a fairly recent one on Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
4. Quit abusing the English language.
If you have a bedmate of the opposite gender you live with, that person ain't your "partner", partner. That person is your common law spouse in a natural sense, and somebody you are avoiding committing to in a more natural sense. Whatever you choose to do, don't call him or her your "partner" unless you are engaged in actual business or criminal activity.
Illegal aliens are still that also, not undocumented workers. Undocumented workers are French slave laborers who are being held in captivity in Nazi Germany who have lost their papers. It's different.
That doesn't mean that illegal aliens are bad people. They're people. But they're here illegally. That doesn't mean that you have to think they should be deported if you don't, but ignoring the fact of an illegality is contempt for the concept of law.
Et tu, Brute?
Not great really.
From the exterior I didn't have a bad year in any fashion, but on the interior and on a personal level it wasn't great at all. I have certain resolutions I make every year and I never seem to fulfill them. On at least one of them, there's a resignation element to it that means I really ought to quit resolving it. I.e., maybe if you resolve to become the Czar of Russia every year you ought to reassess your goals.
On the other hand, I suppose, there's that grasp ought to exceed your reach thing that can go on. That is, a goal may be unrealistic, but how unrealistic? Becoming the Czar is unrealistic, and becoming the Metropolitan of Moscow is likely as well, but with each step down something is more within you reach. By that , for example, I could become a Russian Orthodox Priest. I don't want to be one, and I'd have theological problems with doing that (I'm Catholic), but there are steps I could fairly easily take to do that, if that is something that I desired to do. You get my point. But if you just decide, oh, I can't do that, then at some point you become one of those people whose horizons become quite narrow and close in. I find that a lot of people enter that stage as they age.
Of course, at some point you really can't do that for one reason or another. For example, way back three parish priests ago, the pastor of my parish asked me to consider becoming a Deacon. I did consider it, but decided I had no calling there. If I were to reconsider now, I'd be too old at age 58 to take it up, as the local rules are that you can't be older than 55 when you enter the program to pursue it. Now, having said that, they do allow exceptions and I know one fellow who received such an exception, although his example likely provide the reason for the existence of the rule. His health declined very rapidly and he served very briefly, as he was already in the "old age" category.
Which gets to the topic of time and physical limitation. In our society there are still some occupations that have upper age limits for entry, with the Federal Government perhaps being unique to some degree in that category as its exempted itself from the laws it imposed on everyone else in this area. But they do make sense. You don't want 50 year olds trying to enter the Army and you probably don't want htem entering your local police force either. I feel that we ought to put some age limits on how old a person can be and still run for Congress or the Presidency, quite frankly, or go on the bench. And at my current age I can't realistically dream of becoming an outfielder for the New York Yankees, assuming that would have been a realistic dream in the first place.
All of which is to say that I'm well on my way to becoming something I didn't grasp when I was younger and now see how you fall into. And I should do something about that.
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