Respect Your Elders

What a boring topic for an American! Respect your elders? That notion runs counter to the hubris of our youth-centered popular culture. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly respectful of my elders when I was young, but that was a long time ago, so my memory is fuzzy. I do remember being a teacher’s pet in second grade, though.

I went off to live and work in Japan for many years right after college. Oh, how things were different there! The deference granted older people in a Confucian society was quite noticeable. Accurately explained, it is the deference shown to those with seniority, not necessarily those who are just older. Even the young buck in a company was given a modicum of authority over an older person who had been hired at a later date. However, given the glacial uniformity in which Japanese society moves…or did move…those with seniority in any organization were normally older in years since birth as well.

My wife and I received an invitation recently from a young couple for whom we had performed a certain service. It was gracious of them to invite us to dinner at their new home. The wife is a trust fund baby, so they had the financial wherewithal to move up in our expensive urban real estate market. The couple are cheerful and bright and absolutely full of themselves. They are the kind who have little self-restraint in the midst of a conversation. My wife or I might start to say something at the dinner table, but one or the other of the couple would think of something apparently worthy of interrupting what we were trying to say. The conversation inevitably steered back to their affairs and was loaded with boasting about their accomplishments, which are actually few since they are still young, besides all of the gadgets that they have bought on Amazon. My wife and I were the ones who had been invited to dinner, so it would have been rude of us to overpower them and wrest back control of the conversation, and my wife is Japanese, so we remained silent and nodded appropriately as they droned on about themselves. All the while I thought that this sort of conversational domination would not have occurred in the Japan that we remember.

Inevitably, when you are smart and aware of current events and you run off at the mouth, you are apt to delve into politics. The couple were typical liberals from a typically liberal region, who were now living in another typically liberal city. Since they are young and wealthy, and have for their short lives lived in liberal hot houses, they don’t consider their views to be at all out of the ordinary.

To them, abortion rights are a matter of course. Half of all company presidents should be women. The government should raise the minimum wage. And, of course, Donald Trump is a felon. There should be no debate about any of these things as far as they are concerned. I must admit that they allowed me to ask some pointed questions to raise faint objection to the onslaught. When I responded with silence or mild incredulity to their energetic bloviation, they admitted that I was allowed to have a contrary opinion. That was alright. After all, they are liberals. Beyond that, they had not a modicum of the kind of deference that would have been granted an elder in a Japanese household. How could I expect them to be deferent, since their short life experience has been so limited and so trivial?

The whole evening was an ascetic exercise in self-restraint for me. And, the cooking wasn’t very good, to boot. This will sound curmudgeonly, but I don’t plan to invite them for dinner, nor do I plan to accept another invitation from them, should it come. Why not? Beside the dysfunction in conversation that I have described, there is another reason. The expressions of differences in opinion regarding politics are no longer academic exercises, as far as I am concerned. The major problems that we deal with today have immoral causes, and offenses against morals contribute to the breakdown of our society as a whole. As one example, the abandonment by so many fathers of their families, especially amongst the black population, is due to the ravages of the sexual revolution and the replacement of nurturing fathers by the nanny state. This gives indirect cause to violent crime, an even more devastating problem. The depopulation of native Americans – anyone born and raised in our country, not just Indians – is largely due to the proliferation of artificial birth control and easy access to abortion. These are but three examples.

Those are life and death issues for our society, and I would be disingenuous if I simply considered them to be a matter of opinion. Godless progressivism is a national scourge that must be opposed and retarded, if not utterly destroyed. Our American society is slowly committing suicide, and the atheists who promote the pernicious policies of the progressive cause have the gun pointed at our collective temple. Young liberals who don’t understand the threat of their mindset would do well to be quiet and listen to older conservatives who have the experience to speak with a greater degree of wisdom.

Post Script: Pres. Joe Biden was born a month after my eldest brother of blessèd memory, who would have turned 80 this month. In my last article, I demonstrated little respect for our elderly president, so you may consider me to be a hypocrite. If so, I suppose I am guilty as charged. I am not sure that I would show the proper respect for our president if I were to meet him in person, so offended am I at what he has done to destroy our country. I solicit your prayers.

(I wrote this article a year ago this month, but didn’t publish it. Now that I’ve reread it, I’ve decided to “run it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes”.)