By The Curmudgeon Emeritus
March, 22 2008
There are a lot of folks out there who refuse to accept a fact -- that is, a hard datum acquired from the natural world by observer-independent, reproducible means -- that contradicts their preferences. There isn't much one can do about such persons, other than refrain from following them around. But they vote, which can cause the rest of us some difficulties.
They drive, too. Your Curmudgeon used to enjoy driving, about thirty years ago. There were fewer representatives of the Wishful Thinking Brigade on Long Island's roads back then. At least, it seemed so. Today's typical Long Island driver appears to believe himself above all the laws of God and Man. If your Curmudgeon were a bumper-sticker user, he'd have one of these:
But perhaps we should proceed to less provincial matters.
Quite a lot of unpleasant facts are a-swirl just now, and quite a few persons are vigorously straining to deny them. Here are but a few:
Given the breadth of Eternity Road's readership, there are probably a few in there that you disagree with, Gentle Reader. It matters not; all are objectively demonstrable. It takes a defiance near to solipsism to reject any of them.
Such assertions are being made all the time. The persons making them aren't merely Robert-Kennedyesque "I think of things that might be, and ask, why not?" types. They harbor an actual hostility to stubborn, impersonal, aplastic reality. They demand that things be different at once, not after decades or centuries of gradual, uncoerced change governed by natural forces.
More numerous others, less hostile to reality but massively concerned to avoid confrontation, ask merely that we refrain from speaking of these unpleasant facts. Avoiding bruises to the ego is the important thing, not grappling plainly with the reasons for our political and social maladies. The attitude calls to mind that of the young "director of distribution" imposed on Rearden Steel in Atlas Shrugged: if we simply refrain from using ugly words, we needn't deal with ugly facts -- and of course, any word or phrase that accurately expresses such a fact is ugly de facto, and therefore ruled inadmissible.
But facts don't change simply because we shy back from speaking of them. Indeed, an undesirable process left undiscussed is usually unattended and unopposed as well, which permits it to progress further than it otherwise would.
Consider the exploding phenomenon of "body piercing:" the deliberate destruction of the integrity of the body for no good reason. Time was, this was called mutilation. By any objective consideration of the phenomenon, that's what it is. Persons anxious to avoid confronting the subject or its defenders ask almost reflexively whether ear-piercing should be considered so as well. Strictly speaking, it should, considering how earrings stretch the earlobe over thirty or forty years of regular wear. However, that minor self-inflicted wound was once the only such mutilation Western society would countenance; anything else gave grounds to doubt one's sanity, and perhaps to take steps about it.
Today, virtually no one dares to imply condemnation of body piercing by labeling it as what it is. Looked at your teenaged daughter's navel recently? How about her nose, or her tongue? How about her friends' navels, noses, and tongues? Do you think any of them would have thought to do such a thing if you and the other parents in your community had taken a definite stand against it?
Perhaps some of you have. Your Curmudgeon doesn't know of you, though. Those that haven't mostly refrained from doing so out of concern for their spratlings' feelings. They allowed their tenderness for their children's self-esteem, and possibly their aversion to conflict, to trump their protective function as guardians of the immature, an inversion of the moral law.
God help us if we can't speak plainly of plain and undisputable facts. God help us if we can't even contemplate speaking against a perversion without flinching from the thought that it might cause an argument! But that's the attitude held by many millions of Americans: Avoid conflict and confrontation at all costs. Nothing is worth fighting over. Keeping tempers cool and voices low is the only thing that matters.
If America is endangered by any conviction or abstract conception, it's that one.
"A wise man knows the sword that will kill him." -- Patricia McKillip
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