Letter to Dad #1

OK Dad,

I haven't been able to write much lately, and I can't help thinking it's to do with you. I see your face every minute of the day. It has still just barely hit me that you're gone and my life feels no different than when you were here. If you're going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life, I'd better talk to you. I don't know whether I'm more scared of your answering back or not answering at all.

Whatever the source of the craziness, you made me this dinosaur: you filled my head with music and history and books and movies, I was your pet project to make into the one person you could regularly talk to about all the things that went through your head. The worst thing about my life is that you succeeded. , You never understood how I couldn't figured out how to navigate my own direction, but how could I when my whole mind was owned by you. I'm now this strange 19th century man of letters adrift in the sea of a world who moved on long before I was born. 

Whatever the disagreements, the worst thing you gave me was understanding of the world. By late 2006 I saw how the subprime housing bubble would lead to Great Recession before you did. Shortly after the recession I looked at the buttressed class divide and realized America would lurch into authoritarianism ten years before anyone would agree with me. I saw the worst of Trump coming and we fought like cats and dogs for five years until on January 6th, you finally acknowledged I was right. As you never tired of pointing out, I also got many things wrong along the way and forecast doom at plenty of wrong moments. But a combination of your bildung and my own life story led me to the conclusion that something was rotten with this country at the fundamental root long before anybody else noticed. When they did notice, they misdiagnosed it, and now it looks like turtles all the way down. Your skeptical liberalism was the right way, I'm just an updated version of yours, but it's the worst possible attitude toward life in America to have in 2026: what profits a man to be pessimistic in an era that deserves pessimism when our only option is to fight it even as we know we'll lose? We have to believe in a better era, we have to believe in better lives, but you never showed me how to do that. You cynicism infects everything, and as a result, the world evolves with seizmic tremors, and we only know how to pretend it's somewhere between 1907 and 1954. Even Mom and Nochem are more of our time than we are. Right or left, nothing is more au currant than to hate liberals. We're not good exemplars of liberalism. Good liberals know how to fight for everything right even as they know that they'll lose so much of what they value in the process. You never showed me how to do that, but you did show me the world. I'm inestimably grateful, I love you more because of it, but it's the worst possible way to live a life. 

Whether people realize it, what every Westerner hates is people exactly like us. Left, right, maybe even center. They hate everything we are, everything we support, every choice we make. They tell us it's nothing personal, but we live the results of it every day. The right may call it paternalism, the left may call it patriarchy, but we embody everything they resent: you and I both.  We are the tragic, skeptical education that assimilated the world's knowledge and came to the conclusion that there are no moral absolutes: only millions of compromises along the way to solutions that are only livable moment-to-moment. We know there is no such thing as justice and equality just as we know there's no such thing as security and liberty, you can have tiny, unreliable bits of each, but nothing is guaranteed and if you take too much of it, you will eventually provoke those you steal them from into stealing from you. We are the people who tell conservatives they have to sacrifice money to protect their own country, we are the people who tell leftists they have to sacrifice non-violence to protect the world. We are the people who tell the right that they have to stay out of the bedroom and tell the left they can't cut people off because their views aren't enlightened--or even that their actions aren't enlightened, we are the people who tell moderates that they procure their self-advancement and complacency at everyone else's expense, and eventually, everyone else will take revenge. I don't know if we are the education they were denied or if we are the self-education they didn't know how to give themselves, but we are the people who know that when you spend your life pursuing ideals to an impossible standard, millions die in the acquisition. 

There is so much to talk to you about and I don't know where to begin. I blame everybody, but I find myself cowardly for not joining the fights without hesitancy. Even as I know the fighters will screw it up and screw it up even as I write, the pen is not enough, charitable contribution is not enough. I know that if I tell the truth about how people are enablers in what's coming, they will hate me, they will disavow me, they will find my provocative prognostications still more annoying than they already do. We need bodies that will put themselves in harm's way against the worst of society, which teems all around us now. I fear getting beaten up, but I think I can overcome that fear. What I can't overcome is that I don't want to get beaten up or worse for a tactical error. I don't want to be Alex Paretti or Renee Nicole Good, I don't want my friends to be them either, but still worse, I don't want the examples of people I know to be the one who leads America's protestors into a situation like Iran's. It won't happen any time yet, but it's probably coming. Still worse than that may come. Still so much worse. People talk about Trump like he's Hitler. He probably isn't, but if he is, he is SO MUCH WORSE. Hitler killed a mere 18 million, but with every danger in the world today, we could stand to lose 1.8 billion. Horror, horror, horror everywhere. Everyone affected. Everyone complicit. 

Will it happen? Well, history tells us that some day in history it will. Not necessarily in my lifetime, not necessarily in Eli and Joel's, but one day, it will happen. The point is, it always happens when people fight tyranny with their hearts without their brains. To do so is to enable people who fight with their brains without their hearts. The world must think with its heart so good can worm its way into evil, and feel with its brain to guard against how easily evil can worm its way into good. Nobody does that today, and if people don't start soon, the results of heartless thinking will begin to display their rot. 

Is it a blessing you taught me to see that while no one else does?