Alcohol Keeps People From Growing
It also keeps conservatives stuck in the past
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On a long drive through a rural area in Western Pennsylvania, you’d be hard-pressed to find a house without a Trump sign. It’s simply impossible to ignore. Aside from the politics, I thought a lot about who these people are.
Generally speaking, they’re good people. Salt of the earth kind of people. They live among large swaths of rolling hills covered in rows of crops. Hills and ridges covered with thick forest, and deep ravines with peaceful rivers at the bottom. It’s strikingly beautiful, and it’s one of the things they think they’re protecting while ironically trashing their environment.
Yesterday was the US election, and I’ve never felt worse about the direction our country is headed. There hasn’t been a more divisive time in American political history in recent memory. Though I have to wonder if this is what it felt like before the Civil War, or even in the late 1960s. The sentiments may have been the same, but the way we exchange information — or misinformation — is drastically different.
I’ve spent some time considering the people around me who I know are staunch conservatives. They hold traditions in high regard and want to keep things as they have been. They don’t like change. They mostly want to live in relative solitude and keep to themselves. They want to have their Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas mornings the way they always have been. They want to go to church and believe in the same God their ancestors did. They want to believe in the value of a hard day’s work and the merits of capitalism.
I was raised Catholic and conservative. I’m a straight white guy from the suburbs who joined the army at age 17. I listened to Rush Limbaugh as a teen because that’s what my dad was into. I was a product of the machine. When I became older and started drinking on my own, I remember distinctly feeling like I needed to be a man and act a certain way. That I needed to be tough and drink like a man.
Looking around me, I found drinking to be so acceptable that I couldn’t see a way out. Drinking is ubiquitous. The industry of alcohol is so pervasive we don’t even notice it. We drink as a culture because it keeps us quiet and happy. We drink because it makes us feel good for a little while. We drink because it lets us forget about our problems.
And we drink because that’s what “real” Americans do. We belly up to the bar and crawl inside a beer bottle pretending nothing is wrong. We drink because we’re happy, because we’re sad, because we’re mad, because we’re anxious, and because we’re lonely. Drinking is essentially a way to bury our heads in the sand because we’re fucking scared.
We drink because we’re terrified to confront the real problems we’re having. We drink because alcohol is like liquid nostalgia. It triggers memories and feelings from the past, and that’s part of its allure. It tells us lies about who we are and who we will become. It convinces us we’re not scared of anything, and it convinces us that the past is better than the future.
It’s folly to think that the past is better than the future, mostly because hindsight provides a better understanding of the past than foresight does to the future. Humans aren’t good at visualizing the future because it hasn’t happened yet, but we can “clearly” see what happened in the past.
But if you pour yourself a strong one, you will be transported back in time. Alcohol keeps us stuck in the past. It keeps us from confronting the real shit that’s going on with us, and the real shit is what’s scary. Conservatives, especially men, are terrified of what’s inside. They would do just about anything than confront their own feelings, and that’s exactly what you have to do if you stop drinking. Drinking is a coping mechanism for something.
Because drinking actively prevents us from confronting our problems, it actively keeps conservatives from growing and evolving. It keeps them from understanding how the world is changing and evolving. But they’re so convinced that unregulated capitalism is the answer, they can’t see how they’re being fooled into lining some rich beer brewer’s pocket. They can’t see how they’re being kept from growing as humans.
We already know the world will evolve. People will grow. The world will change. It’s those who are stuck in the past who will usher in their own irrelevance.
If you think I’m way off base, watch this satire piece The Onion put out a couple of weeks ago.
I must be tapping close to something if The Onion sees what I see.
And what I see is that conservatives are the ones who are scared. They want to be tough, strong, red-blooded Americans, but they’re afraid of everything — including what’s inside themselves. It’s much easier to go for a beer at the townie bar than to talk about anything real. They’d rather hide in a bottle than deal with their own demons.
They’re afraid that turning inward to look at themselves will turn them into pussies, but the truth is that it only makes you stronger.
You wanna be a fucking tough guy? Grow up and get your flannel-wearing ass to therapy and talk about why your daddy beat your ass until you had welts, or why he wanted your mother kept at home raising babies. Could it be because he was afraid of his own insignificance? Or that he would lose all the power given to him by a patriarchal system for hundreds of years?
My biggest problem with conservatism as an ideology is that it’s based on not being true to yourself. It’s the fear of vulnerability and honesty. It’s pretending to be tough or pretending to be a winner when you’re really scared.
You won’t turn gay if you admit you have actual feelings. And if you do turn gay, this lovely path we’ve paved for you allows that to be ok. Show your kids that it’s okay to be scared and okay to be human and vulnerable and not to bury their feelings.
And have a fucking beer if you want, but don’t use it to pretend it’s still 1957, because it’s not.
