Carel Isaak de Moor: Nar [Fool] (1705 - 1751)
A fool or madman,
looking sideways and holding his elbow with one hand.

"We, The People, seek an ever-MoreDecent Union here."

I, and everyone else in my generation, was raised under a remarkably primitive and repressive regime. We learned to maintain a modicum of Decency despite the pockets of absolute obscenity surrounding us. We discovered potentially useful coping methods that helped us maintain some semblance of sanity when everything around us seemed crazy. It was easy to spot crazy in those days because our fathers and their fathers before them came from even more repressive times, times when whole generations barely survived state-sponsored deprivation. My grandfather was raised in a world where his leaving school after third grade was considered in no way exceptional. He had work to do and a way to find through the world. My father, too, left school to survive. His family needed him to labor more than they needed him to graduate high school.

When I was five, several blocks along West Main Street, the primary thoroughfare through town, was set aside for prostitution. Bars and pool halls also lined those sidewalks, with discreet entrances for “hospitality services” relegated to the back alleys. Prominent merchants owned those buildings, the same ones who donated to support the churches, of which there were many more than a spare minimum. My high school was an armed encampment of the United States Army featuring mandatory Reserve Officer Training Corps classes for the boys and an optional auxiliary for enterprising girls. We tolerated unreasonable searches daily and humiliating scrutiny of what we today call bodily autonomy at the whim of anybody in the administration. We learned how to behave like gulag inmates, skills we despised learning every bit as much as we despised learning Geometry, though those experiences would later come in handy.

We are subsequently not unaware of how to live in a less Decent society than the one we built in the generation plus since we left high school. It was sometimes a one step forward and two back slog as we worked hard to adapt into more Decent times. The enemies, as we advanced our civilization, were never in question. The forces worshiping earlier repression as somehow sacred: Conservatives incapable of dealing with emerging social equalities, Christians who embraced the Old Testament, and the terribly wealthy who seemed paranoid about losing their status. The forces arrayed in favor of the future seemed straightforward. It seemed as if it included everyone else, representing a massive majority in favor of expanding Decency in this society.

What did we learn by inhabiting such a shameful past? We learned not to take any unreasonably meted out punishment personally. Those punishments always spoke loudest about the punishers themselves, who always seemed to have been unable to outgrow some indecent adolescent urges. The cruel can never become enlightened, and they must always array themselves against Decency at the risk of losing the only identity they’ve known and grown to rely upon. Theirs was never survival of the fittest, but of the shittiest, justified as a struggle for their simple survival. Even in high school, the innocent were most often punished, usually for the grave sin of daring to be different, especially if they couldn’t realistically help it. To be born gay in those days was to be born in leg irons. It seemed that everybody, later in life, disclosed that they’d been harboring a “shameful” secret during those times. It might have been true that everyone suffered from the original sin of individuality. The decades since had dramatically improved the possibilities for those who previously suffered for their inescapable selfhood. Children and grandchildren seemed to have it better after.

The absurdity of focusing upon making anything greater “again,” discloses a troubling obsession with the past. We inescapably only live forward, either learning from and improving upon our unavoidably ignorant past or worshiping that otherwise escapable ignorance. Making greater “again” cedes the possibilities living and learning entail. It amounts to the greatest cruelty anyone can ever visit upon themself. It stifles the self and, by extension, if it gains authority, it stifles society or tries to. Those of us who grew up in the gulags of the past understand what’s lost in such transactions. We know how to pass, how to protect our essences beneath carefully tended bushel baskets, but we’ve grown too old to bother too much now about the consequences of being found out. We’ve still got mouths on us, and if we learned anything growing up under repressive regimes, it might have been that we could have spoken out more often than we did. We colluded with the regime when we kept our secret selves hidden.

We have little left to lose but generations of progress. The indecent proposals to deconstruct our Decent government seem destined to ultimately fail in some spectacular fashion. We’re all paradoxically nostalgic until we re-encounter the tragic circumstances we were forced to live under then. Then we remember, and the flood of memories wakes us from our reveries. We became better than we were, and damned if we’re gonna sacrifice our Decency to satisfy anybody’s dark imperial fantasy. We lived under kings and found them unresponsive. We, The People, seek an ever-MoreDecent union here.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz