Zoon Logon Ekhon Rockon: Why You're Not Your Parents Though You Can Make Yourself More or Less Understood By Them

I think your language-acquisition comparison is probably spot on, because we pick up identity pretty much DESPITE our sweet selves. I mean: you worked pretty hard to become the ostensible you, but you have to maintain a GRIP not to slide into your Ma's political taxonomy, even while you maintain your intellectual distance. Just like Chomsky/Pinker linguistics: we are born with slots in our brains [figurative slots, I hope] for verbs, nouns, adjectives, even ADVERBS, and then we spend our lives filling the slots. But if you fill them one way when you're young it's pretty hard to go back and fill them up a new way when you're old. Our linguistic identity is pretty much coagulated by our early 20s, but our political identity tends to thicken later. Language binds us to our parents, and politics separates us. Good Lord it hurts to sit at your parents' table and disagree with their politics. It feels like they're questioning your very independent being. Politics can be ontological.

This last year and a half with my parents here a couple of times per week I learned that actually our politics aren't really terribly different, but our REASONS for believing what we believe show our time in American history. Maybe the deepest vein of that history is what appears to be the inevitable expansion of categories protected by legal rights: first it was the king, then it was the royals, then it was white men, then men, then smart cooperative grownups. Now gays and illegals, in some states. Even animals are afforded some protection. And corporations. It's a slippery slope, brah, and your identity is on it. How could you NOT be different from your parents with all this slip-sliding liberalizing going on?