By Jim Hagarty
2017
When I was 16, I was filled with many answers to the mysteries and problems of life. They were simplistic conceptions. How could they be otherwise. These people were good, those people were bad. These beliefs were right, those beliefs were wrong. There were not too many gray areas. Just like our television sets in those days, a lot of black and white.
Fifty years on, I have fewer answers. My TV broadcasts are in colour now and so is my outlook. I like to think that now, I have a bit more humility than then. What happened to bring that about was 50 years of living. A half century of mingling and working with others. Good times and hard times.
In fact, I have a lot more questions now than answers although I am not in hot pursuit every day for explanations. I am not in a race to shape life to suit me but am trying merely to shape myself to suit life. I have periods now of peace, a contrast with the 16-year-old me who was a bundle of excitement, fear and despondency.
Sorry to make this political, but I believe that a lot of conservative-minded folk never seem to progress past the “got all the answers” phase of their lives. There is an expression out there somewhere that if you are a conservative at 18, you will be a liberal at 80. Life will make that transformation. I shouldn’t make this judgment, but it seems to me people who travel become more open-minded as a result. I have travelled quite a bit in my life. I know people who have barely made it past the city limits of the place I live.
But, I have known people who were liberal at 20 and conservative at 60. They find success, accumulate the rewards of that, and then spend their days worrying that some undeserving souls will come and take it away from them.
There is another expression which says something to the effect that the wiser a man becomes, the quieter he is. He has fewer hardened opinions and less need to share what it is he thinks he knows.
It is frightening to me to watch a U.S. government that has been taken over by self-assured 16-year-olds, who are fully confident of their assessments of good and bad, right and wrong.
What I don’t see among them, I am afraid to say, is any heart. And yet, almost to a man, they are Christians. They think only in black and white. No room for compromise. Up is down. Cruelty is merely “telling it like it is.”
What it really is is tragic.
