Juxtaposition...

So, Thursday night my son was fiddling around on the wife's laptop at the kitchen table, and opened some conversation with me about a governmental initiative ongoing regarding shareware and piracy and BitTorrent and a bunch of other things that I really don't understand, which quickly devolved into his shouting screed against government, the futility of citizen activism, and "why the hell should I vote when there's nobody to vote for..." Ah, the angst of youth...

I'm jealous, of course, as at his age I'd only voted in one election, and then not intelligently or with any passion or great conviction. I just felt, headed into my first legal opportunity to vote and already part of the green machine, that if my employer was going to stick an M-16 in my hand, a .45 on my hip, and a few grenades hanging off my flak jacket and send me into harm's way, the least I could do before shipping out was to vote. I didn't really understand how government worked, the roles or functions of political parties or lobbyists, or much of anything else. We were only slightly beyond Viet Nam and Watergate, and the standing of government in the eyes of the average teenager or any age voter for that matter was at a record low. Maybe even lower than right now...

My boy, on the other hand, was raised in an intensely political household, grew up the son of a political activist and Congressional candidate, and was responsible for building and maintaining a campaign website that was recognized at the time by a national political magazine as one of the best in Texas. Not bad for a then 12 year old, eh?

And now my youngest offspring, a decade later and after spending his life subjected to voluminous information unimaginable in my youth, constant exposure to the 24 hour news cycle, unlimited access to commentary and dissection on every stripe of matter, and political discourse across the spectrum both electronically and in person, was sitting in my kitchen expressing a somewhat reasoned angst against politics and government and the system and "the man" that hearkened back to those halcyon days of the rock era of my youth. Man, did we have great music in the 70s, or what?

I found myself trying to calmly explain to him the sometimes subtle distinctions between battles and wars, strategy and tactics, progress and perfection, participation and apathy. These aren't easy distinctions to argue with a young man who is measurably brighter than I or his peers ever hoped to be, with a mind like a razor and a passionate indifference to the efficacy of government. Only a couple of years ago, while so many of his age group, with my and others' unsubtle encouragement, were fervently supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, this one was dripping with cynicism and scorn for "another corporate lackey," based on the seemingly irrefutable argument that a successful participant in the corporate exercise of contemporary American politics can be nothing but. The whole notion of having to vote for "the lesser of two evils" sits and sat poorly with him, and while he did vote for my candidate, it was reluctantly, and might not be repeated any time soon.

I reminded him that, while I'd failed in my 18 month campaign, a battle I'd had with the Federal Election Commission, the immediate outcome of which precipitated the whole disastrous exercise, was ultimately decided in my favor and has significantly improved the ability for an average Joe candidate to wage such a battle going forward against entrenched and monied incumbents - no small feat. I also reminded him that another battle I'd lost on its face has resulted in a significant rewrite of Texas political petition regulations, with the end result being that dozens of local option elections which hitherto would have been defeated have proven successful over intervening years. I even reminded him that, while Barack Obama had been handily defeated in my overly red home state, that we had cut the traditional GOP victory margin in half here, potentially marking a tidal change that might help unseat the incumbent Governor and mark a major shift in the state's political course. Or maybe not...

My rationale for making all these arguments was to try and encourage the lad to retain some focus and to remain involved and to care - something he's never been too big at. Which made me recall that my own apathy at his age and for more than a decade beyond was born of ignorance - a lack of concern coupled with a relative lack of information. And I then realized that his is born of the exact opposite - too much exposure, information, understanding. And yet both sets of contributing factors had brought us to not so different situations - my voting blindly in relative ignorance only because I felt it was my duty, and his refusing to participate in a dirty system over a too fine understanding of its reality. Neither being a healthy approach or winning recipe for the maintenance of a civil society...

And the final thought I had walking away from this exchange was a sense of wondering at exactly what point I had developed the patience and acceptance of nuance and imperfection that is the hallmark of an old man. And pondering whether somehow the distinction between knowledge and wisdom might somehow be contained in the answer to that question. And imagining what sort of man my son would grow up to be, and the nature of the world he would come of age in. And I remembered back to the cynicism of my own youth when I was of the conviction that bringing a child into the shitty world I lived in back then would be tantamount to a mortal sin. And I wondered how different we really are, and how much alike...