FEBRUARY 1, 2021 – On Saturday I enjoyed an overdue telephone conversation with my good friend Derek, a 35-year old graphic designer from L.A. By the close of our talk, enrichment outweighed regret for not having talked since May.
I met Derek two years ago at our co-working space in downtown Minneapolis. He worked for a design firm based in L.A., but having an adventurous spirit, he’d wanted to try out a different part of the country. His work allowed him the freedom to do so. After investigating the Twin Cities he moved here.
Derek struck me immediately as bright, articulate, amiable, well-educated, imaginative, and, most important of all, quick to laugh at my brand of humor. He treated me as a peer, respecting my opinions despite their eccentricities.
As time passed, we enjoyed many earnest political conversations. Derek became a Bernie Bro; I stayed a “Go Slow with Joe” bro. Our divergence in this regard seemed minor in the scheme of things. Philosophically and in principle, we were very much aligned. I was deeply impressed by Derek’s thoughtfulness combined with his intelligence and psychological comfort with ambiguity. I’d walk away from every conversation thinking, “The future is in capable hands.”
In the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, Derek’s immediate neighborhood in Minneapolis was aflame. Soon thereafter, he and his girlfriend moved back to L.A.
Subsequently, we exchanged a few texts and tried to schedule a call but never got our acts together to have a proper conversation—until this past Saturday.
After catching up, we talked politics, and, just as inevitably, about history and culture. Derek led by saying that in his opinion, Biden has turned out to be exactly the right person at the right time to lead our fractured country. “I still agree with Bernie’s analysis,” Derek said, “but he’s too much of a Nurse Ratched for these times. What we need is someone who can achieve calm and stability, and Biden’s that person.”
Derek’s remark was the segue into a discussion of reform vs. revolution; the failure of “justice” in the Bolshevik Revolution; the failure of “reason” in the French Revolution. I conjured the image of a house in need of serious repair: ignore its structural defects and eventually, it’ll collapse; tear it down in anger, however, and in the process, its inhabitants will be destroyed or consigned to living exposed to harsher elements. Derek expanded, suggesting that the house contains many rooms, some of which are luxury apartments, while others are dens of squalor. “And the latter can’t be remediated without affecting the former,” I added.
The conversation ended with Derek’s summary of the “light as waves vs. particles” dilemma explored by Neil deGrass Tyson on the Nova show, scienceNOW, which Derek and his girlfriend have been watching. This uncertainty in physics underscored our assessment about the political realm: all we can know with certainty is that certainty is unknowable.
With that, we signed off, relishing yet another (inconclusive) conversation.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
