Know Jack #466 Out of Touch or Out of Style

I’m so old school that my schoolhouse has only one room. Every day I listen to music that was made before I was born. I regularly say all eighteen things Gen Z wishes Boomers would quit saying. Like my favorite fictional character, I read all the books about chivalry, knightly codes, and battling dragons. I have tilted at more than one windmill. I had a hand in putting the old in old fashioned.

Some people question my hold on reality. I’ll buy that; after all, I am a fiction writer and invisible people speak to me. I live in four of five different worlds, But every one of those worlds shares the same values. They are the values I learned from my father and passed on to my children. The value of these beliefs is not diminished if I fail to live up to the ideal. They are valuable because they are eternal and held in trust across cultures, and religions.

Duty, honor, benevolence, fidelity, justice, compassion, and courage are the values that put us in touch with and illuminate our humanity. They divide the light from the darkness in the human soul. Even those who rail against exercising these values desire them from others.

To hold to the touchstones of virtue while the world abandons them is only to be out of style. I’ve never minded being out of style as long as I remained in touch with who I am. I have seen many styles come and go in my time. Most of them are later recycled by a “new” more enlightened generation.

It has been the “style” of those dreaming of utopia to build it upon the ashes of human values and the broken bodies of those in touch with those values.