9 September 2024
Hindsight, so the saying goes, is 20/20.
As is the case with me and any aphorism, cliché or idiom, even during this rare occasion when I’ve correctly stated it, I do not agree with it.
Looking back at any event or emotion is fraught with filling in whatever it was that you didn’t see “back then”. I don’t call that insight “hindsight.” I think of the realization as the desire to see whatever it was you didn’t see, or know in the long ago.
For some individuals, the reckoning with having been wrong is a fate they cannot face. They flee from the mere awareness of having made a mistake. Their egos are so overblown and prickly that the mere thought of having been mortal is more than the super-sized self-pride can bear.
In my experience of that long ago, hindsight didn’t have to tell me that such a person is cowardly, perhaps even a coward. When I was a whole lot younger, I didn’t realize that the coward is not aware of his cowardice at the time that he, or she, is behaving like a bully, a callous cad, an uppity, spineless know-it-all idiot.
I’d tell him, or her, to her face!
That crucial want of understanding caused me problems galore!
Backstabbing, side-stabbing, sleight-of-hand-stabbing, delayed stabbing through a surrogate: they all came my way, all except the act of frontal stabbing which is somewhat less immoral, but much more honest for the coward. That is, unless he engages in his assault by night, or stealth, or entrapment.
It’s not been easy for me to compare the child that I was, with the child that the devious adults around me reacted to, as if I were an existential threat.
In hindsight, I realize that I was a grave threat to their subterfuge existences. I seem to have glibly gone about my business of artfully pointing out their subterfuge to them, as the most efficient (quick) way of surviving the lopsided situations in which those self-absorbed adults engaged. They promoted, sustained, and protected their stacked decks — at all costs — because they were gaining so much from it.
I was one shrewd little cookie as an adolescent, gauging how best to morally maneuver my path through, and out of, the muck of the minefields of morally-challenged adults. Too many of those egregious and ungenerous mindsets were running the show, where’er I’d go in the New Jersey of the ancient long-ago — the 1970s.
After transplanting myself in California in 1979, I possessed the distinct advantage of having seen the pond-scum hierarchies of the Northeast; so when I encountered the Golden-State version, I put 2+2 together, and arrived at 4.
I was outnumbered, though, by legions of arithmetic-deficient natives. They were unbelievably willing-to-be-deceived. They saw it when they believed it; whereas I believed it only when I saw it, and verified it, at least twice, with at least 3 verifiable sources.
A weird situation, indeed.
Politics really had nothing to do with the weirdness of this type of person to invest emotionally, financially, even spiritually in the pipe dreams offered by politicians. The most powerful driver in that human engine was a peevish, colic-y expectation of self-entitlement:
I deserve to be catered to, and taken care of, by the Political Class, at the expense of someone else.
The peasant-mentality was very strong in the Golden State of Moonbeam. By the 1990s, that crabby, cranky arrogance morphed into pretentious-peasant-pride at the mere thought of being deemed a worthy recipient of whatever it was that the Elites were promising, to the Voters during That Election — at the expense of The Other Voters.
I now ask myself, with and without hindsight:
How does a person, born in America, arrive at the sensibility of a Russian peasant of the 19th century? Why would any individual pin his, or her, hopes on being courted by the leech known as a politician? Why does anyone believe that The Government Giveth — but never taketh away?
It’s a brave new world we’re facing here in the States, a country that has been mis-managed, for many decades, to the point where entire industries have been reduced to propaganda arms of one Political Party. And where nascent industries that seek to speak the truth about that deplorable reality have been silenced by the Fascists of the 21st Century.
I am quite sensitive to the creepy feel and stench of suppression, repression, regression, and oppression. The guvmint-enforced shutting-up of freely born citizens in any presumably democratic country prompts me and My Muse to start talking, singing, writing, painting, designing a new house, drawing, sewing, gardening, reading, cooking, cleaning, baking — in short: creating!
When that country of The Shut-Your-Mouth Event is mine, I respond to the rinky-dink overlords with the forms and flights of artistic productivity that I’d felt being squashed, like bugs, by the Penny-Ante Fascists of the 20th century in New Jersey.
It’s an amazing godsend, the ways that certain things come full circle, with and without that hindsight, when present-sight is 20/20.