By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Thoughts on seeing those college kids get arrested in Boston for protesting Israel and punching the police: I remember being young myself and searching for goals and places and objects that seemed authentic. My life through high school had been too frictionless. The working class, the ethnic other, the difficult journey all beckoned. I didn’t want to live in a suburb and I didn’t want what my parents had managed. Our ticky-tacky house seemed lamentable to me; an architectural crime against good taste. I even liked my meals with a side of virtue.
Liberal politics was part of the deal. I grew up with the cynicism that flooded this country after Viet Nam and Watergate and the finer nuances of those situations fully escaped me. Reagan’s charm in particular galled me to the core (even now I like Nixon ten times better).
But year by year, life drew me towards the center. I took work in criminal defense, where I dealt with cops every day. I learned to not only understand their work, I learned that many were terrific people. I married someone from Texas, with all the cultural and religious import of that peculiar fact. There are farmers and engineers and football players in my family now. I returned home to New Hampshire, where my neighbors were as likely to be Republican as Democrat, and their politics turned out to have no bearing whatsoever on how good or bad they were to share property lines with.
Finally my wife and I had a child, so we came to depend on our entire community in brand new ways. His teachers, his coaches, the parents of all his friends; the strangers we’ll never know who built his schools and ball fields; our own sets of parents, who did the best they could and thereby gave us something solid to shoot for. It doesn’t take a village. It takes hard work, and personal responsibility, and the iron tang of experience. Then it takes a village.
Along the way I learned to be tired; to appreciate a simple meal and a good night’s sleep, not as an affectation but as part and parcel of my family’s existence. I learned how to wake up at five in the morning, to go to sleep at two in the morning, to worry and care and seethe. It isn’t politics anymore and it isn’t culture either. The business of life brings integrity in its wake.
Nor did this drift to the center bring with it any blind acceptance of the status quo. It didn’t make me more conservative to become less doctrinaire. I still bridle at injustice and I still enjoy new and different things. But in classical terms, my perception of this world has gone from Platonic to Aristotelian; the older I get, the less I see through the prism of abstract thought and the more I grasp through the vantagepoint of experience.
Minds are closing on both the left and the right today. Where cities used to be places for people of different backgrounds to meet and live together, they are now hives of the self-selected, the self-righteous, and the self-centered. Students no longer go to universities to learn; they go to confirm their own thoughts. And those thoughts run pure, unsullied by practice or history.
I try to muster sympathy for idealists of all stripes but they are too close to power these days and they are doing too much harm. The young have historically been distant from authority, making their voices a useful prod; but not now. Nor have they maintained their natural monopoly on simplistic thinking. Their elders either ape them in the name of electability or they never grew up themselves.
Today’s political climate makes me look back with regret at my own old ability to make snap judgments, out of loneliness, out of laziness, out of pure adolescent orneriness, and it makes me newly grateful for my job, my family, and my home here in purple New Hampshire. People in other places might not be as lucky as we are.
It was so easy when I was a kid to criticize the squares and the conservatives and the rednecks. They had just lost a shooting war, they were losing a cultural war, and they had no handle on the future. Only now do I see the real story of the ticky-tacky house in which I was raised. Those homes are still crimes against architecture and they still bring social costs in their wake. But when you work for them, when you cherish them, when you fill them with your children’s belongings, they are also quite lovely.
Michael Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.