Engagement through Enragement

Today is my 89^th birthday and birthdays are as good a time as any to reflect on what has gone wrong or right along the way.

That path is considerably longer as one enters a tenth decade

I was born into the lower middle class in 1935, smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression. There was a lot going on societally in those times, and when someone hungry knocked on the kitchen window of our house in Evanston, they got a sandwich and a glass of cold milk. That was called neighborliness in those times but now it would be called engagement.

Neighborliness has a sense of love and compassion for those less able than yourself, while engagement is something armies do against other armies. Language matters, and George Carlin has a great piece about the deterioration of language across the decades. Now, there’s a rule about links in the middle of essays—don’t do it, because it takes your reader elsewhere.

You have my permission to go elsewhere because George does what I try to do, and does it so much better. Maybe you’ll come back, maybe not, but George will make you wiser.

But it’s been my experience that each of the ten decades I stumbled through was just slightly shittier that the one prior

Automobiles are not as beautiful, people are not as kind to one another, and cops no longer walk beats, to kneel down so little kids can touch their pistol (with just one finger, if they’re really careful). Moms are no longer at home when kids come home from school, family dinners went somewhere when I wasn’t looking and banging though the screen-door to catch fireflies in a Mason jar with your kid friends doesn’t happen any more. Too dangerous out there, Mom would say today, if Mom were home to say it.

But Carlin (and I hope you watched it) filled in my thoughts on at least seven of the ten decades to which I refer.

And so we can jump ahead a bit and get to the meat of the bone

We have chosen in recent times to trade off engagement for enragement and are the poorer for it. Republicans no longer serve conservative issues, but gather en masse to defeat any Democrat issue, even those in their own best interests, simply to keep a win from the opposition. University protests, either pro or con Israeli action in Gaza, meet one another with baseball bats and demand divestment from anything Israeli in school investment funds. Our Supreme Court overturns the will of a majority of our citizens in case after case, giving not a damn for precedent. In all three branches of American government, Mom isn’t home after school.

In an incident just yesterday in Chicago, a car full of teens opened fire with automatic weapons in a drive-by shooting at teens who returned fire with similar weapons. The action was caught on a doorbell camera.

Engagement through enragement needs no better definition than that

And the examples of our moral downfall need no other proofs…fill in the blanks with your own. We have somehow lost the love we once had for that knock on the kitchen window by someone poorer than us needing to eat. My father taught me that by example and there was no better conservative Republican than my father.

I have found there is a misconception about being old and wise

I am old and certainly not automatically wise. What small wisdoms I have to offer are mostly the result of having done almost everything there is to do in life, wrong, and having survived to tell the tale. Long lives increase the opportunities for stupid decisions, and I have made my share. But that’s how we learn. And learned people are often mistaken for having wisdom.

And that’s pretty much the end of my thoughts on the subject as I take myself off to bed on the first day of my ninetieth year. Goodnight to you all, and I hope you watched George Carlin. He’s left us now but, with the miracle of the internet, he’s there pretty much forever and has much to teach.

You might have come to think he’s a hero of mine…and you would be right.