Radicals

Back in the 1970’s, I was incarcerated at the University of Texas for five years while I struggled to get a bachelor’s degree in journalism. You’d suspect such an experience would have afforded me some exposure to radicals, but it didn’t.

The Viet Nam war was lost and forgotten by then and most of us were just happy it ended before we were forced to participate. The tension of the 1960’s — including a little incident with Charles Whitman — seemed to have left Austin, Texas drowning in the cosmic undertow and just wanting to survive another day. Consequently, I never saw a march, a sit-in, or even a good on-campus fistfight.

There were a few bitter individuals and even some organized groups demanding acceptance of their particular sexual proclivities. And there were some pretty conservative fraternities who wished those folks ill but they never seemed to cross paths. In general, Austin of the 1970’s was a live-and-let-live community (unless the Aggies came to town).

I had good friends on both sides of the political line, and I had good friends on both sides of spirituality line, and I had good friends on both sides of the sexuality line, but we all enjoyed the same beer and progressive country music and chicken-fried steak and Mexican food so what could go wrong? We got along.

One of those friends, I spent a lot of time with. We were both in Photo-journalism classes together and assisted each other on photo shoots. Whenever we could skip class (which was often) we traveled all about the hill country in his old Volkswagen Beetle, shooting large format images of old towns and magnificent vistas. We learned to process every kind of film together and gave each other tips on what chemicals provided specific effects. We got along.

Near the end of my time at UT, I got married and my spare time became spoken for. I had less time than before to go out drinking and listening to progressive country legends, but my friend and I remained close. We got along.

After one last semester of educational imprisonment, I earned my parole and headed back to Dallas. My wife, Paula, and I met new friends, hooked up with old friends from UT who had also migrated North, and even found time to begin a family.

I jumped around from one marketing and/or photography job to the next until I landed at Texas Instruments, the job I assumed I’d retire from one day. Oh, to be young and naïve again. Surprisingly, my old friend from Austin also landed a job at the same company and we began meeting for the occasional lunch to catch up.

Those were the Reagan years when conservatism dominated politics and organized religion in America became pugnacious. While I didn’t agree with lots of what I experienced, I was confident that things would work out well for my little family. My friend was not so comfortable; we agreed less and less frequently.

A few years later, the good folks at Texas Instruments encouraged me to start my own business. Actually, they encouraged fifteen-hundred of us to take that plunge on the same day, but I was one of the fortunate ones and landed on my feet. My old friend, not so much.

I got busy running a company and watching my wife raise the kids without my help but somehow, she stayed with me and we survived. Paula and I attended my fortieth high school reunion where we ran into even older friends I hadn’t seen in years. The magic was there and somehow a group of us melded into a cohesive clan. We got along.

Then came that sparkling jewel of social media, with its promises of closer relationships, and communication unfettered by distance. I even encountered my old friend from college on there and we “friended” each other. But it was like George Costanza once bemoaned on Seinfeld, “Worlds are Colliding!” Suddenly, friends from one realm of life were interacting with friends from another…on a daily basis…24/7. There was friction. We all ceased to get along.

Relationships shattered faster than a California wine cellar atop the San Andreas. Why could people who weren’t even in the same room with each other not tolerate a little diversity of thought? For a culture steeped in relativism, how did everything become so concrete and inflexible? And what the Hell happened to the concept of “getting along”?

It finally occurred to me that a radical is not someone who thinks Donald Trump walks on water or that Barach Obama was the black incarnation of Christ. Those are just fanatics and we’re all fanatics about something, whether it be our favorite sports team or the proper way to grill a steak (which might mean “not at all”). A radical is someone who — either, through too little self-esteem or too much self-esteem — cannot tolerate individuals who fail to share their beliefs.

It has absolutely nothing to do with who’s in the Whitehouse or who’s behind the pulpit or who’s in the bedroom. It only depends on your character and my character and what we allow this crazy culture to mold us into.

Have you become a radical? Do you think I’ve become a radical? If we don’t figure out a way to join forces and defeat radicalism, we better start stocking up on bullets, beans, biscuits, and beer because the apocalypse ain’t far away.

A meeting of great minds who think alike