What I think we lack sometimes is confidence that in the long run of things, a certain kind of homespun wisdom wins out in culture. When you look at the social transformations of the last two centuries in many societies, there are some you can credit to the forcible intervention of the state or dominant social classes, but a lot that just sort of incrementally and complicatedly happened. Sometimes because things that used to make sense just stopped making sense, or the cost of a certain kind of practice became higher for pervasive and unplanned reasons. Sure, you can keep talking about why guns are a bad idea, or why the fantasies of certain gun-owners are just actively dangerous or wrong. (Say, that it would have helped anything for there to be three or four guys carrying handguns in Aurora. Anybody with police or military experience, any responsible gun owner, knows that’s stupid bravado.) The conversation can continue. I think the more curious, the more exploratory, the more interested in the range of actually-lived practices people are (on all sides), the more possible it becomes for real change to occur, for the great knotted muscle at the heart of contemporary American life to relax, unwind and open up.
Don’t Bring Policy to a Culture Fight | Easily Distracted. An absolutely fantastic, necessary essay by Tim Burke. Certainly something I needed to hear.