15 February 2009

We so desperately want everyone to just cool it, and see things from our perspective.  I read an Op Ed article in today's newspaper about Obama and taming the cultural wars; my immediate thought was of Professor Samuel P. Huntington and The Clash of Civilizations - no such luck.  This article was about the clash of left and right cultures in the United States.  My, how myopic; there is so much more.

However, I would contend this is our - well, emotional myopia - and it is so symptomatic of what is really happening in our culture, of which there are two positions (big deal).  We insist on living within our our cacoon centered world of self absorption - it's us, us, us.  Nothing else exists.   All the rest are people essentially just like us, but without the opportunities.   May I respectfully suggest that is just not true?  But we don't want to hear it - at least those that we refer to as liberals don't.  Liberal, the one side of our own cultural divide, want it to be as they want it to be, and think little beyond that except to criticize those who disagree with them, as they pursue their own myopic quest for power.  Emotional naivite.  The deep dark secret (at least to them) about culture is that there are people who don't see things the way we do.

And our current - deliberately naive, in my opinion - administration is similarly deliberately emotionally naive.  Well, perhaps not entirely; they prefer it that way because the cutural wars in which they are interested are those within their power cacoon.  They prefer to see all those other cultures as merely needing to be nurtured, sweet talked and soothed.  If we would only be nice to them they will be nice to us, and we can all live happily together again (again?  Same fantasy, new verse).

History and the long-enduring clash of cultures does not support that.  So once again we learn the hard way.   Will we never learn?  No, we will never learn, so we are doomed to do it over and over again.

I wish them luck, but suspect they will need far more than luck.  And thus we will all suffer as they learn - the hard way.  Our political view of culture is, well, naive - and myopic, - but then, take consolation in that it has always been.