I asked my granddaughter and grandson the other day just how a person could have a civil discussion when one side takes on an issue, often wrongly in my opinion, with evangelical fervor. Their being at four years and 22 months of age, I’ve grown to respect their opinion, though from the young one it is offered in two and three-word sentences.
The four-year-old was too busy for idle questions on this day.
The grandson was busy putting blocks in the right holes—you know, square where the square belongs, circle where it fits. He then headed toward the book where the green frog (la rana verde in Espanol) and the red apple always seem to catch his eye.
In a page or two he pointed at the blue fish (el pez azul) and nodded. Fish. El pez. He nodded.
I quickly got his drift.
You offer a person of intransigence a fish. I’d thought of that before but I’d forgotten. I was going to offer Michele Bachmann a wild Alaskan sockeye fillet as a measure of my willingness to listen to her views and accept where they came from. I will do that, even though she’s opting out of Congress. I have a feeling she’ll still be around poking reason in the eye. Offering a fish will be my way of opening a civil conversation.
Offering a fish in no way guarantees that the conversation will go two ways. I guess it really doesn’t matter. I will offer a fish. I will be civil in my offer. I will hope for civility, not fervor, in return.
In the meantime, the granddaughter had put on her mud boots and coat and was headed outside. Pretty quickly the young one was trying to climb into the backpack, saying “outside, outside” enough times that I had to agree it was time to go for our walk where we collect flowers and pick a cattail and watch butterflies. At the end of the road, the cattle may be grazing. A white barn leans in a vacant field.
The grandson is open to words and images of all kinds. A mailbox is a very compelling object. The granddaughter is a little beyond simple rote learning and imagery, putting together questions like why put mail in a box.
Ah, the open-mindedness of youth. They’re taking it all in without bias, without any notion of the anti-intellectualism so rampant in our culture in these modern times. Isn’t that an oxymoron of sorts, hyperbole, that we are a thoroughly modern society that has pretty much ignored intellectual thought even though the founders of the nation based their democratic experiment on study and reason and philosophical debate?
There were many scientific thinkers in the mix. Many celebrated the scientific method, that process that generally doesn’t prove as much as it disproves, allowing fact and reason to break through and replace stubborn myth and old wives’ tales.
It must be something in the processed food most people eat nowadays that makes today’s political and social climate averse to reason and intellectual thought, that makes false skeptics of the uniformed. Maybe it’s something as simple as monosodium glutamate or disodium inosinate that makes the human mind resistant to civil and reasoned discussion and replaces it with blind or myopic evangelical fervor, no matter if the subject is religious in connotation or not. The National Rifle Association isn’t a religious organization, but it speaks with religious fervor and creates devils no differently than a snake-handling evangelist. A logical discussion is out of the question if you bring up guns.
Climate change is a fad to the CEO of a coal company. The science that may indicate the planet is warming is the work of devils and witch doctors, according to many of the finest anti-intellectual scholars and creationists.
Climate-change skeptics like to point out, erroneously, that the idea of warming is new, a passing fancy of scientists in search of funding. What most people fail to notice is that the idea of climate change—that hundreds of years of burning fossil fuels may have an impact on the atmosphere—is a notion that first arose nearly a century ago. Thinkers understood that we lived within a closed system and that pumping pollutants skyward might have consequences. It is no fad. To a world built on cheap fossil fuel, it was a notion that had to be ignored as long as possible, and it has been. We’re all in on that myopia.
The grandkids aren’t two of the myopic sufferers. They may not have all the knowledge and trivia stuffed in them like we do, but they still have something in them that most of us seem to have lost.
Open-mindedness.
An unfettered open-mindedness.
There are no devils or boogeymen. Just mailboxes and cows and cattails. All I can say is that they and their little kind are the hope of the future, and we must never let them fall into the clutches of the uninformed and superstitious.
     
Forrest Johnson has been writing for over 20 years and was editor of the Lake County Chronicle in Two Harbors.