Alan S. Oser

I’ve changed my mind.

I’ve changed it so many times over the years that it is time to recognize that change itself, rather than the subject matter of the change, is the principle that has been subtly at work all along.

Does this constant change in mind from one stage in life to another signify that I cannot make up my mind? Does it signify that the opinions I have changed were never held very strongly or clearly understood in the first place? Does it indicate that I have steadily grown wiser or sillier as I’ve grown older?

None of these, except the bit about growing wiser. I like that idea, whatever its truth.

The indisputable truth is that my values have changed under the weight of personal experience. As a youngster I tended rather simplistically to attribute most of my problems – and the world’s; I did not make a clear distinction – to the harebrained attitude and actions of my elders. No problem seemed insoluble to me, and the more distant it was to my own life the more soluble it seemed. Ill will was in my opinion the principal obstacle to peace and contentment throughout the world.

Sixty years on, the exact opposite appears to me to be the case. Now I feel that no problems are soluble, at least not without creating new problems, worse, perhaps, than those that ostensibly were cured. So my curative ambitions have subsided. To smooth family friction seems a sufficient ambition to me now, and alas a couple of problems have cut so deep that they too are beyond my curative power.

In some respects the black-and-white views I held as a youth in the 1930’s and 1940’s were justified by the events and personages of the day. We had Hitler then – clearly all black – not to mention Mussolini and Franco. They were all black too. Their opponents had only to be their opponents to be white. It was not hard to be ardently on the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War. Then there was Stalin. It was easy to overlook his evils once Germany had invaded Poland and Russia. With these events to distract me, my own travails with my eighth-grade teacher, Miss Hamilton, seemed unworthy of my close attention. They got it despite myself.

Miss Hamilton was grim and tall, a no-nonsense disciplinarian with gray hair and an unsmiling countenance. Her young Jewish victims believed she was an anti-Semite. I was convinced she was also a German sympathizer. Or a Republican at the very least. Miss Hamilton made us line up by height in two long rows, one of boys, the other of girls. We had to hold our partner’s hand while walking. Since I was short, I was always the first boy on the line. The first girl was always the pretty Nancy, my longstanding crush throughout elementary school. Nancy was a half-inch taller than I was – another cause of my childhood miseries.

Miss Hamilton would come down hard on me when she caught me trying to talk to Nancy. Nancy escaped the teacher’s ire, since she barely looked at me and never talked to me. Besides, she wasn’t Jewish.

Before the age of 12 I was writing letters to Congressmen reprimanding them on their voting record and instructing them on how they might regain my favor. Sometimes they would write back thanking me for my interest. I took these replies as a compliment to my wisdom. The celebrated Southern bigot Senator Theodore Bilbo once favored me with a lengthy letter. He advised me to free myself from the fetid atmosphere of New York City and breathe the pure air of America before I lectured him on the matter of voting rights for Negroes (as blacks or African Americans were then called). To be honored with vitriol from Bilbo was a highpoint of my youth. I hurried to send a copy of his letter to the liberal newspaper PM, which reprinted most of it.

Ah, issues were clearcut in those days, at least to me. Bigots stood up proudly and admitted they were bigots. To treat a human being as less than human because of his color seemed proper to such people. Bigots survive, or course, but they sing a different song now. The curative civil rights measures that have been adopted in law and society since the Johnson era in the 1960’s have made a difference. Abuse of minorities must be carried out by subterfuge.

Nevertheless, the laws have produced problems. Advantages given to blacks in school admissions, for example, have had the unintended consequence of benefiting students from high-income black families at the expense of whites from moderate- or lower-income families. To note these flaws and work for cures is not to practice bigotry, I believe, although fifty years ago I might have considered such a view an expression of it.

On the whole, age and experience have made me more sensitive to the downside of social action, and concerned about the possibility of the unintended consequences that may follow progressive public policies. During the Johnson presidency, for example, easy mortgage policies by the Federal Housing Administration encouraged an upsurge of home buying by low-income minorities, and in some cities they began moving rapidly into white neighborhoods.

With real-estate brokers encouraging white flight, neighborhoods changed their racial character too rapidly. In the end, many of the buyers lost houses they could not afford to maintain, while many white owners found that the house they had lived in for decades, with the expectation that it would be their primary financial asset in old age, had lost its market value. This was not the outcome the liberals of the 1960’s intended.

Leaving aside egregious injustice, I came to believe that social change in general, and demographic change in particular, ought not to come about too rapidly. Nor am I convinced that healthy change can come about through government fiat, even though thoughtful legislation can help and is often necessary. Public policies with admirable goals can produce misery as well as justice. They should be undertaken cautiously.

On the other hand, the elderly must beware of being excessively averse to change. I am suspicious of the comfort I feel in my house. After living in it for 35 years, wouldn’t my wife and I be better off moving to a new environment, meeting new people and refreshing the steady course of our lives while energy and health last?

Mrs. E.S., whom I met at a party in the summer of 2006, would disagree. She told us she was 86 years old and had lived in the same house for 80 years. Her father built it. When she married as a young woman, her husband moved in. She became a widow 29 years ago, she said, and her two children, both over 50, live in Syracuse. She was well-dressed, attractive and healthy, to all appearances.

“Where would I go?” she asked, when the subject of moving came up. “My world is here.”

Stay put, Mrs. S. We may too. After a certain age, it is easier to ponder change than to bring it about. It is nice to hold on to the past. We have greater respect for its ways, and a lessened enthusiasm for seeing those ways changed. Time after time, we see its errors repeated.