Searching For Perfection

Some adolescent thought patterns have become a little bit clearer to me after decades of teaching history to idealistic teenagers. For example, many start perceiving their parents’ flaws and their disdain for those flaws sometimes manifests as rebellion. Having heretofore seen their parents as perfect, the newly-perceived foibles often become magnified. Then they see defects in everybody and figure there’s no point in trying to improve anymore because perfection is unattainable. Others rebel because they still believe humans can achieve perfection both as individuals and, collectively, as a society - and become intolerant of anything less. They will roll their eyes in disapproval and walk fifty paces behind parents in public. Criticism of parental blemishes becomes quite fashionable with their peers.

By their twenties, most lighten up on their parents as they accept that no human is perfect, but persist in their belief that a perfect society is attainable. If their government doesn’t successfully anticipate all difficulties, for example, or doesn’t fix them immediately after they occur, then it’s incompetent in their eyes. At this point, their acidic parental disdain is transfered to their imperfect government and it’s fashionable to run it down. Yet they persist in thinking flawed people can create a flawless method of ruling society in which everyone is nice and generous works hard for the good of everyone else. All get whatever they need - free education, health care, housing, food, transportation - and government pays for it all by taxing those who produce the most. It’s a socialist pipe dream of course, but a persistent one among liberals young and old.

Liberals don’t consider themselves communists, but will speak of it wistfully and belief in the communist ideal of “From each according to his ability, and to each, according to his need,” dies hard. Although communism has failed miserably wherever it’s been tried, that’s only because it wasn’t applied properly, they insist. If only the right people had been in charge, it would have worked nicely.

The optimistic enthusiasm of youth is valuable for our culture and energizing for us all. Every society needs it, and it's one of the things that keeps this old teacher coming back each year. As Winston Churchill said: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart. If you’re still a liberal when you’re forty, you have no brain.” Youthful idealism has its place and works best when it’s guided by the wisdom of experience. When I teach students about today’s political spectrum, for example, and explain that I used to be liberal and now I’m conservative, they ask what made me change. My short answer is: “I grew up.”

Thankfully, the Constitution creating our republic was written by men who had grown up, and that’s why it has lasted this long. A guiding principle as they wrote was their conviction that humans are flawed, and exercise of government power must be checked and balanced and decentralized - and, that people will be most productive when pursuing our own happiness.

The curriculum I’m responsible to teach is 20th century US History and one of the strongest dynamics in that hundred years is the struggle between our free enterprise system and the rise of communism. In the second half of the century, the Cold War was its principal dynamic. To help them understand communism’s appeal, I use The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Communism, which starts by describing utopian communes springing up and dying out in Europe and America in the mid-19th century. Among these were Shakers, Amana communities, Rappites, Brook Farm, Oneida, and others. Some lasted many decades and others were flashes in the pan, but all diminished to the point of extinction, or close to it. There’s only one remnant, for example, of Shakers in Poland, Maine, not far from where I teach. Presented are many different examples of how flawed people attempted to create perfect societies. When during the 20th century communism was attempted on a grand scale in the Soviet Union, it collapsed dramatically after seven decades. In China, it’s morphing into a government-controlled capitalism.

A few students each year think communism could never be a realistic method of running a country. They intuit the classic criticism that it sounds good, but won’t work because people will not push themselves much when the benefit of their labor goes to others. Playing devil’s advocate, I’ll point out that their parents’ labor is mostly for their benefit, and that fact gives them pause. They eventually conclude that, outside a family, communist ideas are not feasible. At this point, they’re ready to accept Winston Churchill’s declaration that: “Democracy is a the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.”

The young liberals I teach have a lot of heart and I’m looking forward to another crop of them next month. Meanwhile, I find myself wishing, as Churchill did in his time, that the older ones now running our government had more brains.

Growth, Change, Awareness

When I was a boy I didn’t like onions. Didn’t like mushrooms or olives either, but now I like them all. Tastes change. Other things change with age too - like fears. I remember being struck by fear the first time I encountered a dead cat. I was walking alone along a stream bed hunting for frogs and turtles to catch when I smelled something bad. Looking around carefully for the source of the awful odor, I noticed the cat’s head with parts of its jaw and teeth exposed in a hideous expression. It must have been hit by a car on the roadway above where I had left my bike. I could feel the trauma of its death still hanging in the air. Maggots crawled under what fur remained on the rotting corpse. It looked and smelled horrifying and I climbed out of the gully in a panic. I had seen dead frogs, turtles and snakes often, but not a larger mammal like a cat. I had petted cats and now had had a close encounter with a dead one. It struck me hard that everything dies and that some day I would too. That’s what I feared.

We all know this at an intellectual level sure as we’re born, but we usually avoid thinking about it, especially when we’re young. I’d been to funerals for grandparents and seen them laid out in caskets, but with so much make-up on faces and hands folded unnaturally around rosary beads, they looked more like mannequins than humans. That cat delivered me death’s unvarnished reality at an emotional level.

While a college student I worked as an orderly at a Massachusetts state hospital on the second shift. It was a chronic-care facility and people didn’t get better and go home. They only left when they died. When one did, part of my job was to wash the body, attach a toe tag, wrap it in a shroud, and take it down to the morgue. My first week there I had three. Luckily I was partnered with an experienced orderly because I was freaked. After a few months though, I got used to it. I had taken care of some patients for months as they got closer to their deaths and sometimes I discussed the subject it with them. I played cribbage with them. I met their relatives. I fed them, lifted them into bed, changed them, joked with them. Some died serenely. Others were consumed by fear. The difference was in how they perceived their deaths. After they passed, it was plain to me that they still existed somewhere, just not in the bodies I knew. As I took their empty bodies to the morgue where the undertaker would pick them up, I realized they had ceased to be people - they were more like abandoned houses no one lived in anymore.

Death can still scare me, but not my own. What I fear is the pain I’ll feel if a loved one should die before I do. There’s nothing I can do about that potentiality, so when it intrudes I put it out of mind. After two and a half years on that orderly job, some of death’s mystery dissipated. Awareness that it’s a certainty for each of us doesn’t diminish life - just the opposite actually. It enriches life. I don’t want to know when death is coming, but I’m better when I live like it could come soon.

Out for a sunset drive in my truck the other night, my wife and I drove up to the top of a hillside cemetery in Waterford and parked. The sun had set and we looked down the hill irregular lines of stones with hills beyond in fading twilight. A full moon came up and the air was crisp. Being in a cemetery at night used to scare me but I’m comfortable with it now. I guess that’s because I know now that death isn’t the end. It’s only the end of a stage and the beginning of another. Time was I had doubts about whether that was really true, but those doubts are gone now. I don’t feel the need to convince others because we all have to come to it in our own way. So don’t worry: I’m not going to preach. I only mention it because it changes the way I look at things - not just death, but almost everything. I don’t doubt anymore that there will be something beyond, but sometimes I forget it. Sometimes for hours I forget it, but then one thing or another will remind me. It might be a baby, a sunset, gently-falling snow, a smile - many different things can spark me to know it again. The duration of those forgetful periods is getting shorter. I hope there’ll come a time this side of the grave when the awareness is constant.