Hand Me Down

Hand Me Down

by Marco M. Pardi

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

William James. The Principles of Psychology. 1890.

All comments are welcome and will receive a response.

By now many readers know I have a daughter and three grandchildren. Actually, the term grandchildren seems misleading. The oldest is just finishing an advanced degree before entering medical school, the next is now a college Sophomore, and the youngest will enter university in the Fall. When I look at them I don’t see children.

Yet, I wonder what they see when they look at me. I try to think back to when I was their age and how I perceived someone my age. Both my grandfathers died before I was eight years old, so grandfather is not a good marker for me. I also grew up in circumstances which meant that I never learned how to be around small children; I relate to adults.

But I decided many decades ago that biological lineage is not the primary determinant of how I judge a person. I was raised that way and found it utterly alienating. I judge (and I use the word in a benign sense) on factors such as wisdom, empathy, understanding, and other elements of what we call character. The problem is that, living roughly 1,000 miles away from them, I get very little opportunity to display what character elements I may have. Two of the most uncomfortable questions I find myself pondering are: Do they know me, beyond the categorical title of grandfather; and, Do I know each of them, beyond the categorical title of grandchild. What if I were asked to write an essay about each of them, or they about me?

Of course I also recognize the huge gulf which rapidly evolving technology has opened between us. I can synchronize and tune multiple Weber carburetors while they zip along on electronic devices I do not know how to even turn on. I’m sure they would ask, What’s a carburetor? But that’s just an anachronistic tidbit, not a character trait. It’s also not a necessary skill for navigating our rapidly changing world.

Traditional cultures place high value on their elders, even encoding them in their legal systems. The loya jurga, encoded in the Pashtunwali, or Pashtun code of laws in Afghanistan is an example of elders gathering to render a judgment. Until the rapid post WWII Westernization of Japan elders were held in the highest esteem. Recent decades increasingly find them parked in nursing homes and “senior homes” not much different from our own.

So what exactly is the role a grandparent plays in the current Western family? Not so long ago when calamitous events such as severe weather or prolonged drought threatened we looked to our elders and asked, Did this happen in your lifetime? How did you handle it? Now we tune to the Weather Channel. Yet, as we increasingly recognize the intersection of climate change and economics/politics, where do we look? The nation wide infiltration of school boards by one particular political party is increasingly bringing severely biased textbooks into classrooms and gag orders onto teachers. Even the use of the term Climate Change is banned in some school districts.

If the parents are too consumed with their own (justified) needs to pursue their careers and support their families to be able to review their children’s text books and challenge school boards at meetings should the grandparents, with more time on their hands and much deeper experience step in? If a grandparent understands the science behind climate change, but the parents have neither the background nor the time to study it or perhaps fear for their careers, should the grandparent step in and discuss it with the grandchildren? How about a grandparent who has intimate and scholarly knowledge of Fascism, and how the United States is galloping headlong into a system which will disempower and subjugate its own people and destroy the environment while making a few very rich people very much richer? Should the grandparent speak up?

If it is true that those children who survive to the middle to end of this century will look back on their predecessors and ask, WHY?, shouldn’t we who know better speak and act now?

Aaah, I can imagine the eyes rolling and the, There he goes again, from the readers outside the United States. Well, for those who might think otherwise, the U.S. is a world problem not a colloquial problem. Although Fascism is not yet the formally admitted name for the American system, the operating principles are well in place. There are three differences between Mussolini’s system and the U.S.: Mussolini is on record as having called Hitler and his Nazis “barbarians” for their treatment of the Jews and other minorities. Trump commented on the Charlottesville, Virginia White Supremacy march by saying, “There are good people on both sides.” And, Mussolini took active steps to address environmental problems, such as draining the Pontine swamps and thus greatly reducing if not eliminating malaria in central and southern Italy. The regime which has Trump as its spokesman is dedicated to rolling back or eliminating every environmental regulation it can in its ruthless attempt to enrich itself. Finally, Mussolini brought the Vatican to heel. The secular Vatican empire, cloaked in religion, was rendered largely impotent in its contest with him. The U.S. regime, cloaking itself in “pro life”, is attempting to render abortion illegal and contraception nearly impossible to obtain while at the same time slashing or eliminating all forms of help for women and children. The end result will be people too desperate to protest working conditions and only too glad to enlist in imperialist military services. The regime is not pro life; it is pro birth….as in cheap labor and cannon fodder. The Fundamentalists are just too myopic to see they are being used.

And I would say the same about those outside the U.S. who deny that American economic, environmental, and political policies extend beyond its borders.

In the past few days the Mueller report has been “summarized” by Trump’s Attorney General and we are told “no evidence has been found that collusion (with the Russians) took place” and Mueller deferred action of Obstruction of Justice to the DOJ. Of course, the regime touts this as total and complete exoneration, even though the statement from Mueller explicitly says it does not exonerate the President. In my view, any first year law student would recognize that “no evidence has been found” does not mean there is no evidence; it means no evidence has been found. Any student who had my Critical Thinking course would also have immediately seen the fallacy in the regime’s position.

If this kind of false narrative is allowed to soak into the seedlings who are our youth what should we expect our garden to grow?

Okay, so I’ve ranted again. Should I not? Should I find a jovial shuffleboard court and pass my time until my time passes? I’m sure some would love nothing more. But some readers of my columns are grandparents. What’s your position? For that matter, one doesn’t have to be a grandparent to have an opinion on this. Even if I did not have my own grandchildren, why would I not speak up for those children out there who, in my view, are becoming victims and pawns in a deadly machine? Why should I not Hand Me Down?