Come, Feel Stupid With Me

We’re going to feel stupid together, you and I.

We look back now at the relics of the recent past, helpfully uploaded (or is it upgraded?) to digital form, and we find things like this:

and this:

and this:

.

And it’s embarrassing.  It’s uncomfortable for all of us, no matter how we’re relating to it.  It’s…it’s pure ::facepalm::. 

And the worst thing about it is that on some level, we’ve all got to know that in another fifty years, we’re going to be looking at all the shit from now, helpfully upgraded to whatever, and thinking holy fuck, *how* did we not know that was racist.  Or sexist.  Or insensitive.  Or advertising-cigarettes-to-kids-level stupid.

It’s going to happen.  You know it.  I know it.

But then again, who can think of even their own personal childhood without that faint sense of embarrassment, too, at how naive and unschooled and doofy we were? 

We have a collective childhood, too, and in most cases it’s filled with egregious doofery. 

So what to do? 

Every single one of us has experienced directly the feeling of being young, and the embarrassment of growing, of learning the hard way.  Growth feels humiliating, because realizing how to do things properly always involves realizing how wrong you were to begin with.  We all feel this way, over something.  But we also, hopefully, realize that we couldn’t have grown, couldn’t have gotten to where we are, without making those mistakes and learning those often-painful lessons.

And we all share a history littered with spectacular mistakes — bloody and awful and logically moronic mistakes — but they were the mistakes we needed to make.  Just like we needed to make mistakes (lots and lots of mistakes) to become the people we are, we also needed to make mistakes (egad, remember the Inquisition?) to become the People we are.   Humanity is growing.  

A healthy adulthood means looking straight at the mistakes of youth, letting go of the embarrassment of "having been wrong", forgiving oneself and–this part is important!–moving on.  Doing better.  GROWING.

I look forward to getting older, and feeling stupid about some of the things I, and people in general, did during this era, like forcing Christian values on a free and secular society, for example.

I hope we can laugh about it together, and fix it together.