A few months ago, essayist and screenwriter Arthur Krystal wrote a piece in The New Yorker titled, “How Problematic Is Patriotism?”
Regardless of one’s opinion about the magazine, the piece is thoughtful, well written and provocative. So much so that in reading beyond the article to some of the responses to it by various readers, one learns that not only is the topic problematic, but any discussion about it brings out pretty extreme opinions and accusations about its author, the magazine and the opinions of the very people who commented.
Opinions have become cottage industries with lives of their own. In Buddhism, one learns about duality, that there is the event or occurrence, and then there is the reaction to it, with the hope being that if the event is tragic, the response to it will be either neutral or conciliatory.
That ship has sailed. In our country, opinions fly like bullets and bombs. Whether this has to do with social media, which gets blamed for a lot of problems, or a perceived lack of civility among our citizens, or some other cause, there is a heck of a lot of anger about almost everything that happens these days.
Wokeness, a concept I am still trying to understand, is a big hot button. Opinions about our president are everywhere, too, because he has dominated the news on a daily basis for more than 10 years, and despite the fact that we hear people are “tiring” of him, he goes on and on.
What is a conservative and what is a liberal are also hard topics to get clear about. They have become so overused that I don’t know what they mean anymore, if I ever did. I thought I did once, when I was about 19 years old, and the fact that I have not evolved much emotionally, intellectually or socially since 1970 doesn’t have much to do with it.
Ideas such as patriotism, nationalism, loyalty, treason, integrity and honesty have become more fluid since I was a much younger man. Although I am very comfortable with everything being relative in the world, I would like to be able to agree that some things are what they are, or were, or might be.
Now, if we can just agree on that, we have a chance to agree on other things or at least to disagree agreeably. That would be progress. Except what do we mean by progress?
Craig Corsini is a writer and grandfather in Marin.
