We must get better at bridging the partisan gap
There was a bar, Olde Queens Tavern, steps from the Rutgers College campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, which had been a hangout for decades when we wide-eyed wonders arrived in the fall of 1970 (when the drinking age in the Garden State was 21 and we were not) that we adopted as our own.
Maybe it's the fog of war but I don't remember ever seeing people in there who didn't look like me whenever I was in there.
I suspect we drove the previous crowd out and, in turn, were ourselves supplanted by I don't know how many succeeding student-scholars (if wet T-shirt contests and dropping shots of whiskey into beer glasses are on the syllabus).
The folks who ran Olde Queens, and who probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (considering our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was time to close. Some of us, I think, probably didn't go home, or have homes to go home to, but leave we did.
This was long before Joseph Heller's "Closing Time" was a state of mind and an attitude check. I'm grateful I don't remember more about some of those nights and the state I was in, and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing because of behavior that went well beyond "youthful indiscretion" without harming myself or anyone else.
The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in those fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed at how well I survived that person's excesses as if that were, itself, a success. What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to remember as little as possible for as much as possible.
More: A lovely spring stroll around Chelsea Parade with a detour to the Lower Falls
I was thinking about all of that yesterday as I channel surfed during the afternoon. (We retirees have a plethora of activities to fill up our days. It's not all standing on the lawn shouting at passing clouds; sometimes it rains.) And surfed from the world according to Fox News to a more disquieting one according to Newsmax, which is politically more right of center than Fox but with production values more closely resembling a high school A-V club.
There were a large number of exceptionally angry white men on both channels who looked like one another and looked like me all at the same time. I always choose to believe we have more in common than what separates us. But, when I switched over to MSNBC where there are even more people who also looked like me (and the Fox and Newsmax folks) but who most certainly were not ideologically, I had to acknowledge we're not making much progress in successfully bridging the partisan gap among us (or even trying).
We used to joke as little kids how "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" but that, as we all know, is an obscene absurdity and a complete lie. Words can and do hurt, wounding in ways unlike any other weapons ever can, without leaving visible scars.
And after the echo of the last of the words has died, all we can do is go on living with ourselves and the consequences of what we have done to one another.
Bill Kenny, of Norwich, writes a weekly column about Norwich issues. His blog, Tilting at Windmills, can be accessed at https://tiltingatwindmills-dweeb.blogspot.com/.
This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: Get better at bridging the partisan gap Joseph Heller Closing Time
