Lately, I’ve noticed a once barely-audible voice in my head growing louder, more persistent, and sadly, more influential. It’s a fussy, curmudgeonly fragment of my personality I’ve derogatorily dubbed “the Old Man.”
In early episodes, the Old Man primarily kibitzed from the background and, at least in my case, offered generally innocuous complaints about having to exercise, be social, or just get off the couch. Gaining confidence, likely due to less intellectual discipline on my part, he moved on to proposing mostly harmless, but clearly cranky, commentary. Here are some examples that have made their way past my lips,
“Skateboarding? In the Olympics? C’mon, that’s not a sport!”
“I’ve driven for years without needing a back-up camera.”
“Is no one capable of using punctuation in texts?”
“Have you noticed how many women have purple hair?”
“Why would they hire someone with so many piercings and tattoos?”
(Yeah, the Old Man seems particularly concerned with people’s bodies and how they are decorated.)
Having tried to live a somewhat examined life, though, I recognize that not all of my inner observations and assumptions are harmless. And as I resist the Old Man’s growing incitement to say some of those things out loud, it’s become clear to me that while this is an impulse to which, I assume, everyone has to adjust, not enough bother to take it seriously.
~
The Old Man seems to be born of a kind of intellectual logjam that manifests as dissatisfaction with change. The real world never stops cascading and swerving around us like a river slipping past rocks. But age makes the current seem swifter, more chaotic. Confusion urges us out of the flow, in search of a quiet eddy near the bank (okay, metaphor thoroughly flogged). The point is: as we disengage, our worldview hardens, and cultural change is inevitably interpreted as a challenge.
Prominent among those changes is how we speak out, and the words we use. Civic “uppitiness” really seems to bother the Old Man. Political correctness, “social justice warriors,” being “woke,” all rankle him. Activism that asks us to expand our conception of how people should be allowed to define themselves and expect to be treated often elicits disdain. I’ve been disappointed to witness this in those I considered intellectual allies. Ensuing attempts to justify their reaction by taking the extremes of some particular “ism” as representative of the whole, only further reveals their own Old Man’s crusty cynicism.
As for other cultural change, my point above about body ornamentation was only partly tongue-in-cheek. The Old Man seems to focus intently on physical aspects of the human condition, notably race, sexual orientation, and gender. This is often camouflaged as commentary on some seemingly unrelated factor. The Old Man might say something like,
“Why is it I can never understand a customer service representative?” or,
“Do we really need to change what schools teach?” or,
“I have no problem with people who are straight, gay, whatever.” or,
“I’m just saying there are differences between men and women.”
In isolated circumstances these comments might be entirely genuine. But as they are so often followed by sentiments like the ones below, the subtext usually becomes all-too-clear.
“Why can’t they just learn English, and speak it clearly?” or,
“So now they’re teaching a black version of history?” or,
“But why do they have to shove all that in our faces?” or,
“And that’s just not natural.”
~
Much of what the Old Man says is specified repetition of general impulses like, “that’s going too far,” and, “what’s wrong with the way we used to do things?” He tells us that we are not the problem, the rest of the world is.
Even while considering the propriety of a gender-specific title for an article about age-induced hardening of the intellectual arteries, the Old Man insists to me that such worries are trivial. “It’s simple, catchy. Who could possibly consider it provocative?!”
Is it provocative? I don’t know. But I suppose taking the time to think about that is kind of the point.