Inheristance: Where you stand depends on where you sat




MIND READERS DICTIONARY : Mind Readers Dictionary show

Summary: "You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them about their respect for Palin, Beck, and McCain. As America becomes increasingly partisan, I sometimes wonder if we’re not just two separate species.  What distinguishes species is an inability to make children. We’re sort of like that.  It’s hard for us to make brainchildren with each other. I do know partisan couples-- a liberal married to a conservative with kids between them. They can cross breed, just not on political issues.  Our government is like that now. The prospects for bipartisan legislation these days are about as good as the prospects for Israeli/Palestinian peace accords in the past few decades. In evolution the most common source of speciation is allopatry, or geographic separation.  Communities of organisms that don’t co-mingle will tend to drift genetically in different directions and when they’re brought back together they can’t mate. Asian and African elephants were one species that split, migrated, and then adapted to different environments. Now they can’t produce offspring together. There’s cultural allopatry too. I grew up in an almost exclusively liberal intellectual enclave, and here I am a liberal intellectual having trouble interbreeding culturally with conservative anti-intellectuals. If you’ll pardon a cosmic parallel, a variation on allopatry makes the universe go round. Literally.  The reason there’s usable energy to make planets or your washing machine orbit is that things that were once unified (before the big bang) became separate for long enough that when they come back together they don’t just re-unite, they bounce off each other from different angles and at different speeds. The difference is what’s called energy. In general, time apart creates fresh, divergent often, conflicting angles of re-entry.  The technical definition of work has to do with the way contact between two formerly independent things forces both off of their natural or “spontaneous” trajectories.  This explains some of what makes Glenn Beck rub me the wrong way.  Obviously he’s been somewhere else. And sometimes I’m grateful to be rubbed the wrong way, like when a friend brings me a fresh perspective on things. Sometimes diversity is the spice of life.  It’s great to be rubbed the wrong way the right way. Vive la difference that in the long run I’m grateful for, and as for the rest--the differences that rub me wrong the wrong way, the Glenn Becks of the world-- I wish they’d go away. This is one of the most horrifying consequences of human leverage.  In our newly interconnected world, it’s harder to just live and let live.  Our different beliefs have consequences for each other.  Beck and his leveraged effects won’t leave me alone. I’m proud to be a liberal intellectual, but that’s not probably saying much.  That my parents and my former self would be proud of and agree with my current self is about as affirming of my grasp of the truth as advertising is a credible endorsement of a corporation’s products.  I agree with myself. So what?  For the most part, who doesn’t? As George Bernard Shaw said “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”  I’m an intellectual patriot.  I believe my ideas are superior because I was born into them. Most of us don’t fall too far from the tree. You could call it your “inheristance,” the stance you inherited from your place and people of origin. I know people who made an all-out effort to fall as far from the tree of their intellectua