“Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now: that is, we have a government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”
-Ulysses S. Grant
Is it just me or do Millennials and Gen Z have much less interest in foreign policy than Gen X (my generation) had at their age? That’s a real question not a rhetorical one. My memory is that Gen X was fairly engaged with the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, US involvement in Central America. The USSR seemed like an existential threat. We paid attention. Gen Z was maybe a bit young at the time, but I don’t perceive much engagement from Millennials with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Not many of any age were engaged unless they were there or had friends or family who were. Were Millennials any different than our population as a whole?) Neither demographic seems particularly engaged on tensions with China or the war in Ukraine. Am I off base?
There are some things worth considering on the question of “manhood.”
(1) Putting aside the language of “crisis,” it’s entirely possible that both men and women are facing serious, but different, challenges created by economic, technological, and social change. In fact, it’s more than possible—it’s likely.
Further, it’s likely that men and women are pretty much always facing serious, but different challenges because life is suffering and change is constant. Here is a universal truth: No matter who you are, it is hard to find your place in the world.
(2) To recognize that men (and women) face (separate and different) challenges is not to say that it is a crisis that can be “solved.”
Because the challenges we face today will be different from the challenges our children face 20 years from now.
(3) What we should do—all we can do—is try to understand clearly the nature of the current challenges and try to course-correct where possible, to make it marginally easier for people in their struggle to find their place in the world.
And you accomplish this through honesty and kindness.
The first part goes without saying. The second part feels more accurate than I wish were the case:
The right has solutions to public safety problems but they’re stupid and evil, the left has no solutions but will call you stupid and evil for suggesting there are public safety problems.
– Armand Domalewski
Two thoughts:
“The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
– Justice Robert Jackson
“Woke”: Aware of and opposed to bigotry and oppression.
From Garret Keizer‘s, One Resolution You Might Just Keep:
If resolution makers wanted a patron saint, they could do worse than Samuel Johnson (1709 to 1784), a lifelong resolver and by his own admission a lifelong failure at keeping his resolutions. Reading his diaries, we may sigh in recognition as time after time — at the New Year, at Easter and on his birthday — Johnson renews his intentions to rise early, to be more studious, to be more moderate in his intake of food and drink, and laments his neglect of those same intentions in the year past…
For Johnson, however, the critical question was not whether he’d accomplished great things but whether he’d accomplished them in proportion to his talents and his limited time. He was hyperconscious of mortality — on his watch was engraved “The night cometh, when no man can work” — and painfully frustrated by his seeming inability to keep the simplest promise to himself. Like almost everyone I know, he felt he should be accomplishing much more than he did…
It’s easy to miss the one resolution Johnson did keep, though to my knowledge he never wrote it down: the resolution to continue resolving. You can see that doggedness as an exercise in futility on Johnson’s part, but I prefer to see it as an act of charity toward himself. If Johnson is known for anything besides his literary accomplishments and his quotable remarks, it is his charity. He housed a motley assortment of needy dependents under his own roof. He pressed pennies into the hands of indigent children sleeping on the London streets. His almsgiving was so well known that he could scarcely leave his lodgings without being accosted by beggars. What was the point? A friend once asked him. “To enable them to beg on,” he said…
Johnson’s personal struggle is worth remembering not only as we form private resolutions to be better people but also as we ponder those collective resolutions repeatedly broken, and in some cases yet to be made, to confront such evils as environmental destruction and systemic racism…
Most of us know that heady sense of reprieve and possibility implicit in the mention of “another year.” I’ve made it this far. I’m not dead yet. I still have a chance — if only to take better care of those for whom “another year” means another term of misery. Johnson seems never to have lost sight of that chance. He saw it all around him, sleeping in the ashes, collapsed in the mire, and he seized it with compassion. How much happier this New Year would be if we resolved to do the same.