Despite us

The more life I live, the more I begin to wonder, "Is it possible, sometimes, that maybe people just won't make the really important changes in their thinking and their lives that will move us forward?"

It's not that we can't. It's that people resist every effort that challenges them to think different and bigger than their current thinking and circumstances.

And, obviously, at some level, that is because some people have to think of more serious and honest ways out of problems before other people can, slowly, get things figured out, better.

But I am beginning to believe that, perhaps, old people, in particular, are doomed to stick to whatever foolish, stubborn habits of thought they have picked up, over the years, and then pretend like those habits of thought are the only ones that younger people could possibly imagine adopting themselves.

The arrogance of older folks of all stripes is often matched by the stupidity and arrogance of younger people.

But the big question is that with so many stupid, arrogant, and fallible folks, what business do any of us have thinking that if we just exert our will over one another then and only then will the world be right?

It's goddamned foolish, is what it is. And the fact is that I have far fewer younger people, in my life, trying to "take charge" with me, in such ways, as I do older people. And those who do often look very, very foolish to me. Which makes me all the more wary of why I am being asked to follow their leads.

The two Presidential candidates, Congress, and most of the political class in Washington could not be a better illustration, right now, of such arrogance as it becomes increasingly clear that they are tilting in the winds hoping that they have better answers which they impose with certitude that they just cannot have honest warrant to assert other than because they said so.

And most Americans who follow this lead do so because they don't know any better.

It would be funny if it weren't so foolish.

We definitely can have more honest reasoning at the core of our politics and our lives. But we often choose, stubbornly, to ignore such reason because doing so, honestly, means admitting so many things that only such honesty would allow as to acknowledge that we just could not possibly know. But that kind of humility would involve a challenge to our egos that most of us just don't think we can handle. Because it might mean admitting shortcomings that we just cannot bring ourselves to admit that we might have. And round and round and round that bit of infuriating circular logic.

We definitely can wind our way out of this circular nonsense. The question is will we. And if we won't, what consequences will this world have to continue to deal with until we can face up to our stupidity.

Much nonsense, if history is any guide.

Most of history's most serious tragedies are bound up in such stubborn stupidity. Perhaps it is stupidity that we will refuse to escape.

In which case, maybe our children will make progress despite us rather than because of us.

Maybe this is how progress has always worked.