One thing I'm looking forward to as I get
older is becoming more "racist." I consider it one of the
finer joys of aging. Children are averse to this kind of thing
because they have no idea, for instance, that handing a kid named Terrell $150
of your hard-earned money for C.D.s, even though he has a bullet scar on his
leg and an affinity for bad hash, might be a bad investment (note: I have
personally done this). You have to learn these things the hard way. Putting
two and two together over a lifetime has a tendency to make you generalize
about people, and if you're intelligent, most of the time you will be right.
At this point, having lived through a series of dangerous and
distasteful experiences with lowlifes, I can tell the difference between a good
and a bad black man within seconds, and knowing the difference between them has
made me safer, richer, and happier in general – something a teenager is
unlikely to understand, appreciate, or accept. The way kids are
indoctrinated today makes them unlikely to ever appreciate it, and the only
thing I can do for a man who places his morals over his judgment is laugh at
him. To watch a smug, effeminate, and fully grown white man embrace
a lowlife and then ask where his wallet went is comedy of the highest order –
funnier than watching drunk people fall off their bicycles or women throwing
tantrums in the grocery store.
As most of us over the age of 30 know, the things that turned us
on at 20 have a tendency to become stale and boring, which means that unless
we're ready to curl up and die, we have to move on to other
things. Drinking by this time has become moderated (unless you're a
drunk); drugs are severely limited or verboten (unless you're a bum); sleeping around
has led to marriage (unless nobody wants to marry you); and most of the music
and television you spent your precious youth on become either corny or boring
(unless you're corny or boring). What's left to us but to
learn? To build? To construct a universe within ourselves
that allows us to master the universe outside ourselves? The
hallmark of manhood is a reversal of bald consumption – the desire to create,
to build a home and a family and a business and a
nation and ideas, to be needed by people, to dream things that not only
sound good, but work well, to stand amid the chaos of the
world and establish your tiny fiefdom in irreproachable order – in short, to go
from having your diaper changed to changing a diaper.
To do this requires not only positive construction, but
positive de-struction – not just the conscious integrating of
ideas, but the conscious abandonment of falsehoods, a moving toward the people
and things that help us to build, and an aversion to the people and things that
ruin the things that we've built. This
daily eureka, the realization that you know something new and beautiful and
useful, the joy of growing this knowledge and applying it, never gets stale and
never grows tiring. It furnishes us with new
materials every day to meet the day. It surprises us here and
there, always with new subjects and vistas and ways to build virtues – not the
ecstasy of chasing women, but more lasting; not the head change of munching
acid, but more enlightening; things that add one good on top of another in
newer and better combinations, leading us not to an ideology, but aperson we'd
never expected – us. It's an "us" of refined
loves and hates we could never have dreamed, because we had never until now
become capable of dreaming it.
The mystery of this thirty-something us, if we've lived our lives
well, is guaranteed to terrify the average teenager. We know this
because we remember being teenagers, and there's almost nothing more depressing
to our young selves than the idea that we'll turn out as boring and judgmental
as our old selves. We say the teenager rebels against his
parents, but the truth is that the parent is almost constantly in an act of
willful rebellion against the teenager. All adults, in point of
fact, assuming they ever reach any kind of intellectual maturity, have already
rebelled against themselves and all the ham-handed ideals of adolescence. It's the
teenager who has yet to do it, and he proves his idiocy by fighting the
thing he's destined to become instead of asking why everyone else has become
it.
Thus the joy of becoming too "judgmental" for the
children's taste. Or "racist," as they sometimes call it,
or "bigoted." The sign of manhood. Observations
you're not supposed to make lead to an endless series of eurekas; infinite
combinations of personal traits form endless combinations of meanings, like the
letters of the alphabet. The stereotypes begin to form, slowly but
surely, all to spot playboys and geniuses and good neighbors and bad friends;
hard workers and slackers and good citizens and criminals; patriots and
traitors; liars and honest men; caretakers and abandoners across all races and
nations and sexes and ages; to assess them by stances and glances and walking
and talking; to sum up this living world and do the one thing a child can't:
to interpret it rightly.
So I say bring on the stereotypes, this ocean of variables
combining into a readable and unspoken language. Let us discover
them, refine them, toy with them, share them, depend on them, joke about them,
love them; combine them with other stereotypes; throw away false ones; update
them ever so slightly as we get older; build systems that mystify youths and
offend all our Pharisees and lead us to happiness. Bring on this
"bigotry," I say, and let age continue to defy youth, with youth's
half-baked ideals and inflexible mandates. Let this defiance be
known not as old age, but the triumph of a manly
and joyful rebellion – against youth.
Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays
on Letters to
Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/03/on_getting_older_and_turning_into_a_racist.html