Conservatively, at any one time, there are a collective 420 years waiting to raise or fold. Over these past years, “yesterday” always seems to be the focus, a softer focus, a matter-of-factness. (New word.) The sense is less of an apology for what was and more an explanation for it. Changes came in the way change might best be consumed—over time, a long time.
We have all, to a one, admitted scandalous actions and words—the hallways of our lives then were much narrower. We lived in our communities and learned from sidewalk to sidewalk, and of course we believed mostly what our parents believed (with the exception of sex, bedtime, and broccoli). We learned about races through avenues of television and some of us took a fresh look at one another, for the first time examining the other one’s last name. But hallways still remained narrow.
We shake our collective heads at the table and wonder how we could have been so distant from what, in retrospect, now seems so obvious. But it wasn’t … obvious. We rubbed two sticks together, if you will, to start a fire, unlike today’s flip of a switch. The news was uninterrupted by commercials; it was Joe Friday news. And it was meted out in small bites, because the hallways were narrow.
Politics was that “thing” that you felt you should know about and would take the time one day to investigate, but not now. Feeding kids and making rent were the paramount issues. No one on the television was selling right from wrong or left from right—at least not so obviously as to permeate those narrow halls enough to make us stop and think.
And that is where we “seniors” stand united in our observation: There seems to be reaction, not thought; the flavor might be accurate but there is no sipping. “Our side says …”—without any regard to Mr. Simon. Ideas need and deserve the fermentation that should come from thought, and while it may seem obvious to some, swift currents make the table suspicious. We are not guilty of ideas we digested as normal and true when we believed they would always be so. We were mistaken.
This new generation has grown up with explanations, retro accusations that are justified within that shield of hindsight and completely out of focus to a generation dueling with a guilt they’re supposed to feel, but don’t understand. How could it possibly have been different? We didn’t have the benefit of understanding and explanations that came in seconds from a keyboard. Most were, it appears at least to this group, political plebes.
When someone tells me, “This is the way it should be now,” and wants some immediate movement as if it has come from the burning bush, it is representation without fermentation.
Half the table voted for someone I didn’t. And long before that inauguration, they were tired, weary, and angry. And I realize no one wants to be told their nonfiction chronicle deserves to be edited—as if it would or could amend one’s today.
There is something frightening about righteousness: It’s not like a sunset that speaks for itself, or music that moves the soul. It lacks the subtle influence water has on thirst, and usually it is offered in fortissimo, showing that it couldn’t last if whispered.
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