Our Elsewhere

In Which I Wonder Why Others Can't Grow Old

2004-04-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
-H. L. Mencken

It's true, I often wonder why others refuse to grow old. Few refuse, forever any ways, to grow older, but most refuse to grow old. Why? Why would you fear growing old? If not in a literal sense, in a metaphorical sense. I guess that people are afraid of the physical implication far too much to grow up, but I believe that more so, they are afraid of the mental implications. Part of growing up is thinking instead of feeling.

You can see it in many teenagers. They haven't grown old yet, for they neither look it nor act it. They constantly refuse to think before doing something, and thus, face sometimes dire, yet often universal problems and situations. But do they refuse to think truly? Given the choice, would they? maybe, maybe not, but the whole point is they refuse themselves the choice.

A person who refuses themselves the choice to be grown and mature is considered naive, however a person who accepts the choice and chooses to no think, they are idiots. This is my definition of idiot, so if you ever hear me use it again, remember exactly what I mean.

Living a certain way, thinking a certain way, or abstaining from thinking at all, whether by habit or by circumstance, is what separates the teenager from the adult... most of the time. Many people would be quick to point out that many adults also do not think, whether by habit or circumstance, and would call them naive as well. This is simply not so, as these people have actively made a choice to do so, and are thus, true idiots.

Allow me to break it down. When you are part of the control system that school is, you have lived your entire life with the luxury of not being required to think for yourself. You simply sit down and learn, mostly, pass your classes, mostly, and fit the mold. However, once you have exited the control system that society has built for us, you no longer have these options. No longer is someone thinking for you... hopefully. You are, supposedly, making your own decisions at this point. You are required to think. At this point, you can actually make decisions, and that is that. Some of these decisions are unavoidable, no matter how much you cower from responsibility.

So at the moment you leave school, you have become either a thinker or an idiot. You are in one group or the other.

So what does this have to do with growing old? That's simple really. Growing old is mostly a mind set. It has that little bit about your body changing and stuff, but mostly, it's about yourself. Who you are, and most importantly, who you want to be.

At this, it is clear that seldom do people grow old enough to keep up with their bodies. Mostly, they throw a metaphorical temper tantrum, and as any PC gamer would say, lag. Not just themselves, but everyone around them.

Age is, to a point, almost entirely independent of this process. For some people, it takes months, for some, it takes years, for some, it never happens, and for some, it has already passed. They have already been slotted a thinker or an idiot.

Who are these people? The naive people have refused themselves a question... a choice. People such as Patricia Ireland, who refuses herself a choice to think often, not only before speaking, but before making decisions. Rush Limbaugh does it, not letting himself see what he says before he says them, and conveying a message that is perceived different than it was sent. To a certain extent, every president does it, committing the error that results in countless demogauging. Nearly every teenager, at some point fall under this umbrella term, reacting emotionally before thinking, which is the definition of immaturity.

However, the idiots are the real dangers to this world. They are the people who have given themselves a choice to think or to opine; to think or to act; to think or do... and chosen the latter. They are the people who have refused to listen to facts, not because they find them faulty, but because they disagree. A fact is a fact. In fact, let me give you one fact that everyone can take home with them:

fact
n.

Knowledge or information based on real occurrences: an account based on fact; a blur of fact and fancy.
Something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed

A real occurrence; an event

Those who refuse themselves facts, refuse themselves reality, in a sad, callow sort of way. Who are these people? These are people such as politicians, mostly. Many scientists, sadly, fall under this group as well, refusing to accept results outside of their theories. Sometimes parents fall under this group, attempting to reinforce their authority over reinforcing the truth. But mostly, the general public, that's you, fall under this group. Just think, (I know, this is the entire point of my rant), for a moment: do you let someone else think for you? Do you take someone else's word as fact, without reason, or rather, because they agree with you? Do you form an opinion before you learn about something, and retain that opinion afterwards regardless? If so, you are one of the afflicted millions.

I fall under this category every so often as well. Everyone does. When I don't turn in my work, (which is far too frequently), I fall under this category. When I cheat or use an unanticipated advantage to escape the wrath of a particular assignment, I fall under this category. When I start attacking a person instead of an idea, I fall under this category. But if there is one thing this point illustrates, it's that our position in these groups, thinkers, idiots, and those who are naive, is not static. We can escape into the thinkers group, or fall into the idiots group fairly easily.

This would beg the question: Are any of us grown? As the title of this rant implies, not really. We have our moments, but the people who are the geniuses in life, are those who learn to coordinate their thinking moments to a time when they are most useful, and their idiot moments to a time of least detriment.

So what is the best advice, what is the way to do this? As Abigail Van Buren said, "Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place." To be a truly amazing person, you have to strive to be amazing. You can't halfway it through anything. As she so articulately put it, you have to be "good in the first place".

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In Which I Wonder Why No One's Done This Before

2004-04-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

"It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time."
-Sir Winston Churchill

So many people these days look around and only see what they want. Not just ignoring the aspects they don't like, which some of us are indeed guilty of, but of changing them in their mind. Of passing a verdict. Far too many people look at the world as something to deal with, yet no one seems to be able to see the world as it is.

Anyone can rant and rave about what should be done here, what should have been done there. Bah, I say. Bah to them. What is the use of trying to change something if you don't even realize what it is? How many of you, before you sit down to yell at someone else for disagreeing, think about how the other person came to that conclusion? Few do. I constantly have to remind myself to do it, often with failure.

I believe this point is beautifully illustrated by a story out of personal experience, and it's only a few weeks old, (as of April 12th, 2004). I was walking to school in the morning -- yes, I attend high school -- and I must cross a bridge to get there. The bridge is over the largest commuter freeway in the city, so I wasn't too surprised to find some form of protester holding a sign over the bridge, trying to get a message to the passing cars. What was this all important message, I wondered. I checked my watch, realized I didn't have enough time, and kept on walking, just like the other thousand or so students who pass by there twice a day.

Now, let me take a time out to discuss this school business. I will not tell you about the school system, (that's a story for another day), but I will tell you something about the students. There are those that are not motivated, you can usually spot them right off the bat. There are those who are clueless, their ambiguity, or sometimes lack there of, giving them away. There are those that blindly follow, their emotional and humorous ranting obvious. I am not one of them, so do not count me as one of them. If you wish to skip over me because you feel I hold no worth, that there is nothing new that I can say, I would tell you to leave, because anyone who doesn't realize that insightfulness and maturity are not necessarily products of age has no business pondering what the world is rather than what it should be.

Enough of that though.

I passed through the day -- I'm a junior, so I have a full schedule -- and completely forgot about these protesters that had been on my overpass. In fact, when I finally started for home at four in the afternoon, about an hour after school got out, I was stunned to find the same protesters catching the return traffic on the other side of the bridge. I had plenty of time now; I was going to get to the bottom of this.

I sauntered up to their sign, reading it from the back by the light of the sun on the other side. They were advertising. For a march. A march on... are you ready? Washington. I nearly laughed when I read their sign, which went something like: "Oh my goodness!! Womens rights!! Abortion!! Bush evil!! March on Washington!! April 25th!!!"... more or less...

I had to hear this one. I knew their stance, and I knew that they were on a mission, but I had to hear them justify it. I had to hear them rationalize stopping traffic so that they could alert the general public to a "march" which, at most, perhaps 0.01% of their ideological supporters would participate in, which themselves consisted of somewhere between one third and one half of the general populous. I was expecting them to brush me off, so I took it easy. I asked fairly benign questions at first. "So you support abortion, huh?" "You do realize that abortion is already legal, right?" "Oh, you are protesting the partial-birth abortion ban?" "You do realize that isn't the only kind of abortion, right?" The kind of things where I can humor them, and make them think that I don't already understand their position.

More or less, they answered me straight every time, which is fine. It's something they really believe in, so I should expect adamant and total devotion to it. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't particularly feel like discussing abortion itself at the moment.

However, you could see it in their eyes... their eyes couldn't see. They couldn't see the world around them. They couldn't understand the world that we live in... the country that we live in. They couldn't see that a ban on a painful a gruesome procedure, regardless of its particular field pertaining to its use, is not something that most humans, let alone Americans, are gonna drive 3,000 miles to protest.

All they could see is how much they needed to change. Don't get me wrong, visionaries are the people that make this world a liveable place. It was Martin Luther King Jr. who said "I have a dream", and there is nothing wrong with dreaming. But Dr. King was different from these clowns standing in front of me, in that he actually saw the world for what it was. He didn't delude himself into seeing the world through his visionary eyes, but instead as his visionary eyes. He pressed hard, he didn't give up, because he had a dream, and he also had the rational and the common sense to realize that his dream was something worth obtaining. The things worth fighting for are the things that we take for granted, but the things worth dreaming for are the things we never knew we lost.

These protesters were different from Dr. King, because they had let the goal consume their lives. You could see it in their faces, that abortion was their life. This was what they did; what they dreamed; what they breathed. It had consumed them, and in an odd way, given them a purpose. I spent about an hour idly giving them probing questions in hope of revealing this to them and me in plain daylight, but only at the very end of my conversation did it come out, and it went something like this.

Me: "So what exactly do you believe?"

Woman: "I believe that every person has a right to a job, a right to their own body, a right to live in a nice house, a right to privacy-"

Me: "Wait, you are trying to get these things realized here? In the US?"

Woman: "Yes."

Me: "You do realize that none of that, save some scare right to privacy and ones body, is actually in the Constitution, right? I fully support your right to try and make a difference, but I don't support the passing of un-Constitutional laws."

Woman: "Well, that's alright, because we are going to have a revolution in this country soon."

Me: (Pause) [At this point I was almost afraid to ask.] "What kind of revolution?"

Woman: "A... Socialist revolution."

At this point, I politely told the lady that I had to be getting home, and walked away stunned. This was the difference between her dream and Dr. Kings. Her dream required my dream to be destroyed.

As I waited for the train, I smiled faintly, thinking to myself: 'Well, lady, best of luck to you with your revolution. Just know that when it happens, you'll be meeting me with a rifle before you can destroy that Constitution.'

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