This, which I ran across on Twitter the other day, is a profound insight, that has more than earned a permalinked spot on my Quotes page. I have witnessed its demonstration in no uncertain terms, watching absurd nonsense that we failed to reject clearly enough, and perhaps laughed off with the assumption that it would simply go away, instead become set in stone as a foregone cultural assumption. The assertion that someone else’s hurt feelings or fragile sensibilities should trump your right to speak freely and honestly. The notion of a “right” to “free” healthcare, of a “fair share” of what another has labored to earn. The exactly inverted idea that capitalism enslaves but the state somehow liberates. “Progressive” used as a casual synonym for actual, desirable progress. All of it nonsense that must be stridently fought, and all of it now what you and I are naturally assumed to believe.
This is an apt reminder of the price we will pay in the future for ignoring such absurdities now, for not taking them seriously enough to mount a decisive counter-offensive:
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other — until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.
If you’re going to chart a markedly different course in life than those around you, it helps to have achieved a general degree of comfort with being different.
Thankfully, that’s something I’ve had ample experience with. From having to forge my own path through a stifling public school system and subsequently mend my relationship with formal education, to getting used to having geekier interests than many of my peers, to learning that I also diverge from those around me politically, I’ve grown plenty accustomed to going my own way.
Experiencing this in various iterations forces you to get comfortable in your own skin. You learn to trust your own carefully considered judgment, despite the implication that you may deviate uncomfortably from those around you. You trust your reasoning because you’ve been forced to think things through instead of being able to assume a default course of action. Through it all, you establish a solid self-reliance that comes in especially handy when having to perform a self-recovery.
I don’t know that there’s any simple shortcut to this level of self-assuredness. It may be something that has to be won through experience: Living enough years to notice that some aspects of who you are are constant. Weathering enough trials that you come to see that the essence of who you are is not so easily undone, and to begin to see and appreciate your differences as strengths. But if there’s one thing I wish I could assure my former self of, it’s this: It gets better. You will find in yourself a solid foundation, and every trial and challenge that you face now you will one day see as a gift in disguise.
Some of the difficulties I faced in the past with being different could perhaps have been avoided. Maybe given a different school environment, for example, I’d have been spared a few years of seemingly unnecessary wandering. But life is such a long chain of causes and effects, it’s hard to be at all sure where you’d end up after tweaking some detail or other of your past. In light of where my feet have landed, I find myself strongly tempted to say that I wouldn’t change a thing. Simply doing the same as others, even if that had been possible, wouldn’t have put me where I am. From where I now stand, with the great possibilities I see in my possession because of what I’ve been through to get here, I’m nothing but grateful for having taken a road less traveled.
An amazing 70 years ago today, the Czech town of Plzeň was liberated by the United States Army.
Thousands of residents, visitors, and veterans gathered to celebrate this anniversary with the Plzeň Liberation Festival (Slavnosti svobodi Plzeň), as they have since 1990 when recognition of the day was no longer outlawed. My thoughts have been with the surviving veterans and our true friends the Czechs, as they celebrated this extraordinary day of hope and freedom. Na zdraví!
Perhaps one of the most moving events of the week took place on Tuesday when around 300 Czech teenagers from local schools gathered in a city cultural centre to hear veterans from Plzeň’s liberation. Altogether there were around a dozen veterans, now mostly in their nineties, both from the US and Belgium. Their broad message was simple: ‘We helped to liberate this county 70 years ago. Now it is up to you to make sure you safeguard the liberty you now enjoy.’ At the end of the session many of the veterans and audience had tears in their eyes.
Don’t miss this photo essay from 2010, which I mentioned a few years ago — especially the story of Zdenka Sladkova, who has tended a memorial at a U.S. pilot’s crash site since 1945.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
