The first Wednesday in November, 1960, several other members of the CYF (Christian Youth Fellowship) and I came to our weekly afternoon meeting sporting hand-printed tags on our chests reading “Impeach Kennedy.”
Obviously, Constitutional subtleties eluded us as teenagers; you can’t impeach someone until he or she is in office. But, as non-Catholics, we were parroting the conviction of many of our parents that America was about to be ruled by a Pope.
As I recall, all of us present that day mourned with everyone else in November 1963 when our youthful President was assassinated. Somewhere in those three years, we had all changed our minds.
I was reminded about this when reading the newspaper recently. A presidential candidate, speaking about President Obama’s “change of heart” between 2008 and the present regarding gay marriage, bloviated, “well, he was either lying then or he’s lying now.” That’s the first time I have seen a change of mind called lying.
One of the few times I have been moved to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper was when that paper criticized the Governor of the state for changing his mind on some key issue. Heaven help us if we elect people who do not have the capacity to change their minds.
If a candidate for office changes her mind to appeal for my vote that would be called pandering. But, if once in office, she helps to enact what I wanted to happen, don’t I win? Does her motive for changing her mind negate my winning?
Much has been written about the speed at which public opinion has changed in America about gay marriage. The rapidity is unprecedented but a change in the dominant opinion of people in the country has happened many times.
Remember laws against interracial marriage? Shock at the idea of women in combat? Thinking that sending Japanese neighbors to relocation camps was okay? Seeing “Red China” as the epitome of evil? (I thought about that standing on the Great Wall one Thanksgiving Day.)
Make this more personal. When have you changed your mind? I’m betting that most, if not all of you, would have no trouble changing your mind if evidence you believed to be trustworthy surfaced that countered your previous way of thinking.
How many of us see things through not just a lens, the magnification of which might change over time, but through a prism that plays with light and can sober our judgment that we are seeing things as they really are?
How many of us, People of a Certain Age, look at the same thing differently with the passage of time because experience intervenes? Re-read a book you really liked thirty years ago and see if you don’t take away new understanding.
In the data about Americans’ acceptance of gay marriage is the fact that millenials are far more accepting than their elders. Might that be because they have grown up in a different world than we did?
I am aware of the danger posed by those who use serial changes of mind to control others. A classic tool of authoritarian autocrats is to crack down on something today that they allowed to happen yesterday, then permitting it again, keeping their subjects in a constant state of uncertainty about what is acceptable or not. I have known some parents and teachers who, though most probably not meaning to do so, sent so many mixed signals to kids about what was acceptable and what was not that the kids were damaged by the lack of consistency.
Like most aspects of life, we’re always seeking the right balance between consistency and flexibility, conviction and open-mindedness.
George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
When I was six, God was a man who wore a black robe and looked very much like the minister. By age sixty-six, I was okay with God being either or no gender and not much concerned about wardrobe. Point is, I believe in God. For me, that is a consistent conviction that I don’t anticipate changing my mind about.
Much else is subject to evidence, my place in life, my attitudes, my beliefs, and whatever other factors construct my prism.
As happened between 1960 and 1963 for those impassioned teenagers (a redundant phrase?) in San Diego, sometimes changing one’s mind changes one’s heart for the better, too. What’s wrong with that?
Daniel E. White
July 7, 2015