AUGUST 8, MONDAY

LIFTED BY THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Two things that happened this week that cheered me up that were outside me and were unrelated to anything that I have done. The first is the Inflation Reduction Bill which was passed by the house as I am writing this on Friday. The bill suddenly became a possibility a couple of weeks ago when Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer worked out an compromise agreement to agree on parts of the huge Build Back Better bill which Biden and the Democrats proposed with fanfare a year ago. Before this week I had been irritated with Manchin for blocking the bill but also irritated with Sanders and the progressive Democrats who in a country where half the population was against these changes and half for them were insisting on their way rather than compromising. If we are ever going to accept change it seems to me it has to come incrementally.

But that was just my opinion. I have done nothing personally to contribute to this bill, not even talking about it, and haven’t convinced one person that it is a good idea. I’ve been totally passive. So when the compromise came, which aligned with my feelings, I felt good although I had no part in making it happen. I felt good just because the United States shifted slightly in the direction that I thought it should shift in. In a way I was feeling good simply because the world had shifted in my direction, making my views be in the center of things and validating my passive inclinations. That doesn’t mean that the the shift was right or even good, it just means that it aligned with my feelings. Other people, all Republican senators and most Republicans in the house and huge numbers of MAGA voters will no doubt feel irritated and threatened because the bill doesn’t align with their personal feelings. To some degree we are banded into tribes. I feel good because my tribe seems to have won, MAGA voters feel that their tribe has been threatened.

In any case how I feel, or how MAGA voters feel, is in a way irrelevant. In a way I feel that a slow incremental shift is taking place in American cultural values. The world is shifting rapidly and very slowly our values are shifting incrementally as we are being dragged along by change. The old traditional values of male dominance, white superiority, religious fundamentalism, gender inequality, racial bias and self satisfied nationalism were the values we all more or less shared when I was a boy and slowly in a globalized rapidly shifting world these values appear to be out of step and actually toxic. Some people are furiously hanging on to the old ways and some people are accepting incremental change. In my lifetime this happened with the acceptance of gender differences, with women’s rights and control of their bodies, with the shift from religious fundamentalism. But the change is slow. The faster we change the more people feel threatened by change and if change is very rapid there is a backlash as is happening with MAGA attempts to return to a mythical 1776. But when change happens slowly and not many feel threatened and what we are afraid of doesn’t appear we slowly accept change. Or when the change, such as global warming becomes obvious, then we accept change more quickly as happened with attitudes toward smoking when we finally realized smoking was killing us.

So in a way what I am realizing for myself is that while I harbor many of the old fears caused by traditional American values, fear of homosexuality, fear of racial threats, fear of American decline that as people around me change I keep my mouth shut realizing that the next generation doesn’t have these fears. I am getting pulled along with change. But I also have the advantage of having traveled and having experience values very different from my own by people I have grown to care for which makes differences seem natural and not threatening;

None of this has to do with being a good or bad person. It has to do with accepting change and changing values as the world changes rapidly. If you are open to change you feel less threatened if you are threatened by change you want to fight back.

So I think of the bill that was just passed being a part of this slow incremental change part of accepting change as it happens. With climate change this might be coming a little late to stop it, it is simply accepting that climate change is happening that lets us slowly change.

So that is my neutral take on change that is happening in the world and whether we accept it or do not. What it seems we need most is goodwill toward each other and patience that eventually change will be accepted.