Culture War Dropout

I recently turned 77.

I awoke to find the culture war, among other things, still in full swing. It never seems to end. Politicians, clerics, cable hosts, and assorted manipulators contribute new ordnance all the time. At the moment, your views of gender privacy, vaccines, “traditional wives,” and immigrants of color may signal whether you’re Good, Bad, qualified for a presidential pardon, or doomed to lose your federal job. Like most culture war issues, if I had thought much about them at all it was that they were settled norms long before.

Yet they keep blinking back to life. Their revivals are almost always a surprise. The only one I can predict is that when we go to war with another country, certain political networks will change the name of french fries to Freedom Fries.

Instead, I cheer from the sidelines, make donations here and there, write officials, and try to raise my hand in public while I fume impotently at the day’s news. Being a conscientious objector in culture wars, however, smacks of being complicit and uncomfortably passive. After three-quarters of a century, I had hoped to be concerned about more serious things.

Most sound laughably unserious when they rise from the dead. I’ve never wholly understood why people get worked up about most of them. Anthropologists will tell you that people have been floating between genders, trying to prevent harm to themselves, adding employment to domestic duties, and having various melatonin levels since the Big Bang. And they’re not going to stop fleeing pain and poverty, seeking safety, having sex, being ambitious, and needing healthcare anytime soon.

I’m now old enough to remember earlier generations referred to battles over non-negotiables like these as tempests in a teapot, which was an unfashionably old phrase even then.

I am, I suppose, woke, which I once thought meant being awake to others’ needs and points of view. These days it just suggests I’m unmanly and oppose free speech. When you get to 77, you try to be amused by it.

That’s not to say I am any less outraged, insulted, and worried about what the culture warriors propose to do. Their cruelty and mendacity are appalling. I am frankly sick of both hearing from and losing to them.

I fantasize about defeating them. I could shed a neuromuscular disease, solve arthritis, down some Red Bull, and regain my speed and vertical leap and reduce the scolds to the shame and embarrassment they deserve.