growing out of it
May 29, 2003 12:54 PM

Why does it seem that no one who takes a conservative viewpoint on politics or a defeatist viewpoint about social change is told they'll "grow out of it"?

I'm serious here.

See. I've been pretty liberal for most of my life. Except, maybe, for the period right after I first discovered politics and decided I was a Libertarian. [In many ways I still am a libertarian, philosophically, but I am not going to associate with those people. I mean, eep.] And I've always been told by people slightly or more older than me that I will eventually have money and a family and I'll want to protect them and I won't be liberal anymore because liberal is somehow not about family and people having enough money.

Well, I have money and I sort of have a family, and I have to say. I don't feel a sudden wave of fiscal or social conservatism washing over me. You know what? The support of my family and the freedom afforded by that money just make me more radical. So, there.

When are you, annoying people who tell me idealism is for kids, going to grow out of being pompous, apathetic and powerless? When are those of you who don't even bother to vote going to grow up and start paying attention?

Rant aside, I don't recall any of the conservative kids I knew when I was younger being told they were young and idealistic and going to eventually grow out of it. That actually makes me feel an itty bit better - if every highly politicized youngish person got that kind of flak, it would be a sad, bitter commentary on the American political system and its reputation.

So, why this association of liberalism with youth and foolishness (why, for that matter, the association of youth with foolishness)?

I'm beginnning to think it's just another part of the lack of an American mythos. Lacking a collection of godlike archetypes and having a Puritan sense of order and organization, we categorize things. [I wrote a paper in middle school I think analogizing Piaget and some other child development guys' notions of adolescence to American culture and politics that tied into this as a reflection of that pre-adolescent fixation on magazine quizzes; it was actually pretty clever. I was reading a lot of fin de siecle German theory at the time.] So, when mass media kicked in the sixties, and everyone saw kids running around being liberal, maybe we decided that liberalism equaled kids and Ronald Reagan equaled normal, adult America.

I think it's about time we grew out of that.