So a friend of mine has recently started, er, seeing someone he never could have seen himself with previously. To me this seems fitting, since he's also undergoing some kind of crisis of faith and perhaps finding his true calling at the same time. Nonetheless it's startling enough when you go through it.
Thing is, she's something of an oddity, this girl he's taken a shine to, at least in our snooty academic circles. She's the cutest, gun-slingingest, Catholickest, stylishest, Republicanest awesome-person I've ever known, that's for sure, and she has an I.Q. of approximately a million jillion skillion. Hers is perhaps the first perspective I'll seek the next time anyone starts whinging about "activist liberal professors" and the unspoken but palpable prejudice conservatives experience in Academia.
I have my qualms about this. I tend to think of my country as having its whole raison d'être in activism, and I consider teaching young people critical thinking skills a sort of activism in itself. As for liberal, well, what looks like liberal on an ordinary day...and I get pretty sick of listening to conservatives blustering about all sorts of other supposedly unfair practices on the part of liberals that conservatives engage in equally, although sometimes much more subtly. In my humble estimation of course.
Although these two have given me a great deal to think about. In fact it's been irking me lately, the dogma that permeates the so-called free-thinking left. There's no reason whatever to behave as if critical thinking is the imminent domain of liberalism, and yet this is exactly what we do. Academics in particular are inclined to think they're liberal because they're more educated, and that no one who possessed a truly superior intellect could ever be a Republican. At my own most vitriolic moments I've indulged in this type of stereotyping, but deep down I know better. Which makes me a terrible communist when it comes down to it.
Note to Big Brother: I have never espoused membership to or even sympathy for the communist party. While this page is touted as an irony-free zone, I do indulge in the occasional wry comment. Please do not come to my house and revoke all my keyboards and pencils as I was only kidding about that last part.
So my friend asks himself: can I be with this person in spite of her politics? My answer, the more I think about it, is: can you NOT be with her simply because of her politics? For myself the answer might be yes. I certainly can't imagine being attracted to someone whose politics were radically different from my own. And if I found myself in my friend's situation, I'd want to be durned certain I wasn't somewhere in the recesses of my heart trying to change her, somehow hoping she'd one day see the light and become as brilliant as Liberal Me.
Which brings me to a recent observation I'm sure I'm not the first one to have had: in a post-everything world in which we industrialized adults can all (mostly) fend for ourselves, families still fulfill a powerful function: they keep us tolerant. For many of us our families are the only thing that remind us you can be a good person and still have shitty politics (whatever you consider those to be). Every day I have to reconcile myself to the fact that the people who taught me the notion that -- no, scratch that, who taught me most everything I know -- voted for the other guy, the guy that I routinely ask myself, screaming and frothing in my car, how anyone could ever have been stupid enough to vote for. Who are these people?! I bellow. And then, oh, yeah, they're the ones who bailed my stupid ass out of trouble for the first two decades of my life.
So there you have it: the truth must lie somewhere in between, as usual. Which in the case of some of us is bound to be pret-ty close to both of us, know what I'm sayin?
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