Learning from the 20th Century? We did!

I have a grand-niece who, in her early twenties, is unsurprisingly, but retrievably leftist.  She was a Bernie Sanders type, back when he wasn't crushed by the corrupt weight of the Clintons and the corrupted Democratic National Committee.  Unaware, presumably, that it was Hillary who had gotten the DNC to tilt the scales in her favor, she then switched over to the Clintonistas.

Needless to say, she was terribly disappointed by the outcome of the election and, like most of her peers, turned to social media to vent their respective spleen.  It is apparently quite easy to hide behind the relatively masked presence, if not the total anonymity, of Al Gore's Amazing Internet.

And it is such that I was apprised of a Facebook post (I am not on Facebook; this was forwarded to me) in which my lovely grand-niece "liked" a tweet from a fellow in England who apparently spends a great deal of his time all day tweeting out little phrases.  In this case, he appeared to be replying to a phrase he had heard, or made up, such that his tweet was this one (remember; he is in the UK):

"Leave that bigoted person alone; they're old."  Translation: They lived through almost every 20th-Century social movement & learnt nothing.

This was the message my grand-niece chose to "like" on Facebook.  As I took a look at the original poster's account, I could pretty much infer that he tweets, and lots of similar-aged people of similar persuasions tweet back, or "like" or "retweet" and reinforce his sense of rightness, certainly absent anyone replying and telling him that there are actually other "right" people who think quite differently.

I'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that, from the context of his other recent tweets, by "bigoted people" he was referring to all Trump supporters and voters, not just actual old, bigoted people.  After all, Hillary already called us "racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic ...", so it can be comfortably assumed that the youthful left can't discern the difference.

I cannot and need not disguise the fact that I am 65 and voted for Donald Trump.  That probably makes the youthful left decide immediately that I am an "old, bigoted person."  They are welcome to presume whatever they feel and tweet their little brains out.  They certainly can presume that I "lived through almost every 20th-Century social movement."

They cannot assume, though, that I learned nothing.

I learned, for example, that the best fable ever written was "The Emperor's New Clothes."  It was the best, because its moral, however written, was that we should not believe that just because thousands of people do or say something, that they are, a priori, right.  Human beings have a certain need for association, and a certain "go along to get along" mentality that turns them into lemmings if they don't engage their brains' capacity for critical thinking.  That, friends is a tool the left uses to its advantage.

The music industry, by the way also uses that tool.

I did learn a few things from the USA's civil rights movement.  I learned that you should be careful about making assumptions about people based on where they came from or what color they were -- but I also learned that offsetting past discrimination by overcompensating was about as ineffective and exactly as prejudicial.  The corollary -- if you want more racism, not less, simply switch the colors and impose "affirmative action" or any other form of reverse discrimination that punishes people who have done nothing to deserve it.

I learned that replacing a system or environment that had a failing in one area with a replacement that patched the failing issue but failed in another was not worth the effort (hint -- check out my Electoral College piece from Monday).

I learned that relationships that are worth the commitment to share a home are worth the commitment to "put a ring on it."  No commitment thereafter will carry the weight it deserves, if the first one can be dissolved just by one party moving out.

I learned that the idealism of the human in his or her 20s is oh, so gradually tempered with the reality of mortgages, and jobs and electric bills -- when you have to earn your money with a little sweat, you get a whole lot more careful about your government wasting it by putting moths on treadmills, or paying for someone else's kid's college tuition.

I learned that socialism cannot be sustained without a dictator -- a Castro, a Kim-il Sung, a Stalin -- because eventually, if you disincentivize success and entrepreneurship in favor of all of the people "working together", tra-la, people stop pulling their weight and everyone's effort declines to that of the typical employee you get at the end of the phone when you call a Federal Government department for help.  And those dictators all turn into the pigs from "Animal Farm."

I learned lessons like interpreting what happened at Hampshire College this month.  You are aware that the school put its American flag to half-staff after Donald Trump's election, and when students complained, they simply took down the flag for good.  I learned that when, say, a child takes something he knows he shouldn't from off a table, you lightly slap his hand; you don't stop putting things on the table -- you teach the lesson.  That flag should still be up there, at full staff.

In other words, I learned the lessons that experience teaches you.  Things that don't work, ideas that fail in practice, fail generally because they produce unintended consequences.  And I learned that children in their 20s are simply not capable of seeing through to identify unintended consequences, because they haven't gained the experience to predict what can happen.  So they believe that "this time it will be different."  And when it isn't, and when their ideas fail, as they so often have, they eventually learn the lessons that we "old" people learned.

Of course, it is 2016, so when those lessons are learned, the learning process is delayed by copious tweets and Facebook posts among only like-minded and like-aged, inexperienced peers complaining about things.  Eventually, they have to get a job.

And, unless they work for the Federal government, they're likely to learn a few things, too.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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