-- NOT trying to step on any toes here, and I’m not sure where I got this from, but I ran across this quote a few years ago: “Politics is sports for nerds.”
I repeat it a lot.
I’ve never been into sports — as far as cheering for “my team” to win or whatever. Saved me from a lot of fashion disasters, growing up in Wisconsin. Green and gold isn’t a flattering combination on me.
I was kind of a news junkie as a kid, though. Like, when I read that Strobe Talbott was appointed to the Clinton state department, I remembered having read a bunch of articles by him in Time magazine in the '80s.
As far as obscure trivia goes, my '80s Marvel Comics knowledge is MUCH more impressive (and I'd be happy to recount the time The Dazzler saved the earth from being eaten by Galactus via her assimilating this dude "Klaw," who was made of solid sound waves, or something like that...).
Interest in politics is more reinforced, though. There's the veneer of being serious and “smart” because you pay attention to the news, to the important things of the day, to the BIG issues about how the world ought to be and how you ought to be aware of injustices and crises around every corner, etc. That’s more than “sports for nerds,” right?
Maybe. I won’t argue about it. I’m just talking about what I see. I can’t convince you of anything you‘re not willing to be convinced of.
When I went to college in the early 90s, “the personal is political” was the slogan I read and saw and heard all over. I dunno if anyone says that anymore.
I sort of bought it. So politics becomes something more than just haggling and trade-offs. It's tied to a sort-of-moral idea of a better world. I found it hard to spend much time with groups of people who really took that seriously, though. They'd suck the humor out of a room and I didn't get why.
I thought maybe I wasn’t smart enough to understand, maybe I was too immature to see the world with the seriousness it required.
But it also seemed to me that “The Political” wasn’t something that could really be discussed freely, and "The Personal" was a mess, if I was honest about myself and about what I saw in the people around me.
It felt like there were a lot of undeclared rules I was just supposed to know already. Lots of things I wasn't supposed to say. And we'd talk about people with contrary views, like they were simply ignorant at best, maybe indoctrinated with “false consciousness,” likely at least a little bit evil.
I had a really hard time with that. I grew up in a small town. In my teens, I'd been close to adults who had much different ideas of the world than I did, much different than what was being reinforced for me in college. They weren't evil or malicious or bitter. They were not fools, they were not idiots. No more than ME anyway, as far as I could tell.
I was young. It seemed obvious, what made for a better world. I thought I could convince people and explain. You just had to be open to receiving the correct answers to the big questions.
The problem with getting older is seeing more, understanding more, and realizing just how much of the world I haven’t seen or can’t see, and how much I still don’t understand. The world conceals itself, masks itself, presents itself in fragments to persuade and influence and distract attention.
I certainly feel "smarter" now that I'm older, but I can’t get past how limited my view of the world is, and will always be. And then I don’t feel so smart at all.
When I need to act with certainty, I try to contain my assumptions to a small range of things that might embarrass me, but won’t be too damaging, if they blow up in my face when I’m wrong.
Maybe that makes me less of a nerd? I put much less value on appearing smart, than I did as a kid. I prefer things to be messy and complicated and contradictory, with ample room for humor and absurdity. That feels honest, at least. Being a yoga teacher allows for a lot of that in my life.
I’m still a bit of a nerd, but as far as “sports for nerds,” I'm not a fan. I don’t cheer for a team. I don't repeat slogans -- I prefer to use my own words, my own way. If YOU think otherwise, that’s cool. I only know what works better for me. I’m happy to meet you in a place where we can both be messy and complicated and contradictory. And LAUGH, please...
Times are interesting. I hope you're keeping it together, keeping things in perspective.
Be well,
Chris