March Thoughts

This is supposed to be my monthly check-in, but once again I am going to use the occasion to try to finish something of a post I have been working on in one form or another for several months. I am always trying to figure out and write little commentaries on various of the issues that command the headlines and the passions of the rest of the populace, but being as it seems ever more self-absorbed I find that I don't care about most of these things very much one way or the other, apart from that almost everyone's position on these matters is about equally unsatisfactory to me. So I want to get at why I both don't have any strong opinion on most of these things, yet think everyone's else's opinions are unconvincing.
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Guns! I've never had a gun nor had any experiences where I've regretted not having one, and I am nearly fifty years old and grew up in a time and in an area where violent crime rates were much higher than they are where I live now. Given current lifestyles and the number of children, and especially sons, that I have, the dangers of having any firearm in the home far outweigh those incurred by not having them. Likewise I am skeptical that there is a social good in allowing ordinary citizens to possess assault weapons that outweighs the unnecessary carnage that they inflict in these criminal types of mass shooting events. I am in general afraid of guns and other highly potent weapons and am attracted by the dream of a society that is effectively free of them. I am not however unswayed by the arguments that given their existence there is at least symbolically some imperative for men who would be free to have the capability and willingness to own and use them, and I don't like the idea of police and militaries being the only entities with access to these weapons, especially as they seem to be less and less responsive and subject to the will of the population than may have been the case formerly. I grant a personal handgun or rifle will not avail an individual man much against any kind of professional modern day force with a legal right to violence that has any determination to dominate him, however the symbolism of this right to self-defense and resistance has a sacred aspect to its adherents, a fervor that is no doubt exacerbated by the ongoing assaults on what is considered by many to be traditional masculinity. Many on the 'left' seem to consider the truth of this last assertion to be some combination of dubious, irrelevant, or pathetic, and perhaps it is, but since progressivism does not offer a particularly compelling vision of what it thinks manhood should consist of going forward and as it does not seem to recognize much in the way of limits where the transformation of the culture is concerned, it stands to reason that some portion of the population would gravitate towards guns as the point of resistance. Perhaps in the end the NRA and the pro-gun faction will be as deftly outmaneuvered as the forces of reaction have been in so many other arenas and will meekly submit in the face of progressive pressure without recourse to violent or dogged resistance. Something of the sort seems to have taken place in other countries, where surely some people must have relinquished their prerogative to bear arms with some reluctance...




Sexual Assault. I guess we have to say that whenever it happens it's really that bad, but is it really happening enough that colleges and other institutions have to adopt policies and take on attitudes that express a kind of blanket hostility towards heterosexual male behavior even when it is not explicitly sexual (my alma mater issued a statement on the subject recently which included issues like male domination of class discussion). It might be nice to hear some more input from women with a more positive experience of intersexual relations, which I believe there are some who exist; especially with regard to the college report, the place comes across as having been a total nightmare for women I guess since time immemorial, which is now to be corrected by enacting policies that at the very least operate under the assumption that men possessing even a hint of what used to be considered normal (non-criminal) masculine attitudes and behaviors are at their very best and most inadvertent potential problems that require strict governance. I don't think this can go on, at least in the sense that men are going to be willing forever onward to submit to the social position vis-a-vis their female peers that these kinds of policies impose on them. It's infantilizing and ridiculous, not the stands against actual assaults and rapes, obviously, but the seeming imperative to effectively neuter them and manage/dictate all interpersonal relations in what should be one of the most vital and expansive periods in life for those sorts of things  




Immigration. I go back and forth on this one because I generally like the pro-immigrant people better than the anti-immigrant people, and they are so deliriously in favor of ever more immigration and virtual open borders. I don't really understand why they feel this way so strongly, however. In my heart of hearts in the past at least my wishes generally trended in favor of less rather than more. The population of foreign-born in the U.S. now is well over 10%, which is about the same level it was when policy became more restrictive in the 1920s. By the 1960s the percentage was under 5%, and indications were that livelier people at least thought day to day existence was getting a little stale at that level, though from my vantage point it doesn't seem like it was that terrible. I have no doubt that there are specific environments and times of life, especially at higher levels of intellectual and artistic ferment, where the interplay of global-class talent is truly exhilarating, but for more regular people cut off from these worlds so much change tends to be stressful and destabilizing and alienating, especially when direct emotional or material benefits from all the changes are hard to perceive. Clearly a lot of people are definitely at this last stage now.




Universities. I see repeated often the idea that the main purpose of a university is to challenge people to wake up from their complacency and make them uncomfortable. Perhaps this has become the case, though my impression was that their primary function was to impart knowledge and instruct students in the processes and approaches to thinking which are characteristic of the most intelligent minds. Perhaps this includes actual moral and political indoctrination, though the idea is that the acquisition of the habits and basic learning of a liberal arts education will provoke the student to examine all of his attitudes and proclivities in the comfort at least of knowing he has some of the tools to do a decent job of it. Even if it is incorrect, having one's worldview exposed and ripped to shreds as a kind of sport with the expectation that, stripped intellectually naked before the world, the student must either submit to the new worldview ready-provided for him by his teacher or slink away in a kind of exile and disgrace, which sounds to me to be what a lot of people mean by insisting they need to make people uncomfortable, does not seem like an especially effective way to educate an undergraduate.




Trump Chaos.  It certainly seems like it must be very bad, but bear in mind people voted for this. The supposed competence of the Hilary Clintons and Mitt Romneys of the world, to be frank, has become a little terrifying to many people, who can see their lives in these kinds of expert hands being discovered to be not efficient or productive enough for the modern world and summarily disposed of. That said, the constant Trump chaos does seem like it must be really bad.

One More Time to Florida

As reported numerous times here, I went to Florida (finally) last week, which I badly needed, as dramatic as that sounds. I had spent much of the winter persuaded that I wouldn't be able to make this trip, or even that I was actually dying. I was convinced at one point that I might never throw the baseball around with my little boy again. It was absurd, but I really did feel these things. My wife, who has great sense, observed that I had evidently never known any discomfort in my life up to this point (which is largely true), but that everyone else had been dealing with it for years already and I really needed to get over myself, which helped me regain a little perspective. I know I need other goals at which to direct my energies going forward, though finding anything that interests me that much and is reasonably achievable has always been oddly challenging. But the trip was beautiful and even though it too belongs to the past now, it is yet the recent past, and the memory of those happy hours is not yet so remote as to be oppressive, for it gives hope that the upcoming summer may bring more times similar to those just passed.

This picture made me quite sad the day it was taken, which was our first day there and I had not shaken off my general depression or otherwise felt that great yet. This is at a place called Spanish Point where you walk around the grounds and there are some historic buildings and displays among the native flora (no palm trees). We had gone there what feels like many years ago when we just had the two older boys--I revisited a couple of sites I had been to in earlier days in the hopes that seeing them again with the current incarnation of the family might cheer me up, which it largely did--but when I first saw this picture my response was, oh, we have been coming here so long, and I look so old, and everybody is so big and everything will be coming to an end soon and there will never be any more happy times, etc, etc, all of which is probably not true, but it is how I felt. It is rare for us now to go anywhere with all four of the boys together. Maybe it will be one of the latter, if not last, times for that. My older daughter wasn't on this outing, but she went out for ice cream with her grandmother, so she still enjoyed herself.

My daughters in their matching bathing suits on the old back walkway returning from the beach. These pictures are really very nice, and I understand even when I am melancholy that I do not actually have at the moment any very serious, real problems compared to most people. I don't exactly know what has gotten into me of late, to the extent that it seems to have gotten into me.

#4 and #6 cavort among the flamingos at Sarasota Jungle Gardens. We go here almost every year because it is an especial favorite both of my 3rd son and my mother in law. It is a large zoolike park full of Florida animals. It strikes me as being an old-time Florida (i.e. pre-Disney) kind of attraction, so I am inclined to like it.

View of one of the gardens at Spanish Point, just for a sense of atmosphere.

Beach play on Siesta Key's famous white sand.

This is more Spanish Point. You can see there is something of a drowsy, old south or old Florida vibe about the layout, at least in this section.

The child is almost too precious for good taste, but I believe she will be able to overcome it.

More shenanigans at Jungle Gardens posing with the plastic alligator. It is not the most serious life perhaps but they are beautiful children really with reasonable intelligence and I have to think some society somewhere if not our own will have a place and use for their abilities and other better qualities. Why wouldn't there be such a place?

The youth eating an early dinner in the "condo".

And the contrast with the later meal, and a glimpse into the habits and perhaps mindset of the author of these blogs.

I'm really pouring on the pictures for this post. But I suspect most real people stopped visiting my site years ago, if any ever did, so what does it matter? This is at the Desoto National Memorial in Bradenton, near the site where the famous, if not especially competent, explorer and adventurer is supposed to have first landed in Florida on his doomed expedition hunting for gold across much of the southern U.S. We went here on our second to last day, by which time I was feeling much better in every way. We had also been here many years ago, which I will come back to later on. This place is really lovely, easy to take in but with some interesting things to see and it is also free, which is always attractive when you have a lot of people.

Sense of the nature at Desoto Park.

We stopped in at St John's on the way back, as we always do. Much of the world, including many of our own alumni, seems to be down on St John's now too. Either they lament the college has been a failure at turning out successful and influential graduates, or they want it to change and get more with the spirit of modern times where dead European males hog much less of the spotlight in the curriculum and living ones of European descent do the same in the life of the campus, or they fume that the current administration is too welcoming of "conservatives", Christians and homeschoolers (I know some families who fit various of these descriptions and the children seem to me to be fine young people, though libertarians are perhaps a different story. To me, if you can't stand the idea of being in the same room with a polite eighteen year old homeschooled Christian, maybe you have some problems of your own). At least this is the overwhelming impression I get from the (mostly childless) people who weigh in on the subject on social media. The place has its flaws and if I would not say that it failed me so much as that I failed myself in some respects, it is true that there were some qualities it claims its graduates to possess that I did not come out of it in possession of. However at the time it did a number of important things for me that admittedly the better sorts of students already had a grasp of when they arrived, but that I might never have gotten if I had not bothered to come and just continued drifting through life as I have largely done, the years at the college being something of an exception to this otherwise sad pattern. I understand that the school hopes its students and the other students hope their classmates will be something more than this, but I am grateful to have been able to get such good as I was able to get out of the experience, which was something to me at least. So I always find that my spirits are lifted by just dropping in on the campus even when no one is there. Of course maybe I wouldn't like it if I went when the students were actually there (it was Spring Break when I was there this time).

These next three are some random pictures from my phone on the last day, when it became cloudy.

My oldest boy.

View of the public beach on Siesta Key.

  

This was another "sad" picture. It came out a little dark. Here we are walking out of the Desoto Memorial park back to the car at the end of that visit. Just off to the left, not visible in the picture, is a small picnic area which we sat in and ate lunch on our previous visit when the boys had been three and two. My wife remembered that some kind of strange animal (not an alligator) had come out of the wood and invaded the picnic area when her babies had been sitting in it on that occasion. "And look at them now", she said, with this view before her.