Why won’t you ever change?

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford on fear of change and how it fucks everything up. Also, since it's Wednesday, I think I'll change my socks...

It all comes to mind as I’m reading about how the NRA is right now sneering like furious, changeless trolls at the Obama administration, given how the latter is daring to propose stricter background checks on gun sales and a complete ban on all assault weapons.

Is it not amazing? Gun fanatics are furious that gun fanatics are being blamed for America’s gun fanatics problem. So cute.

The NRA, like any conservative group, reviles change. The NRA exists solely to enflame fear of the unknown, fear of Other, championing only ignorance and childish anxiety about the world. Their membership depends entirely on a lousy educational system and a visceral hatred of nuance. After all, the less intelligent and informed you are, the more dangerous the world appears, and the more you will desire a deadly weapon to compensate for what you lack in compassion and perspective. What, you calling me stupid? You calling me ignorant and racist and violent? Say it to my Glock.

The NRA, sadly, is far from alone. Did you notice the unmitigated shock and disgust the entire Republican party faced – and is still facing, every day – when it realized the American electorate had finally tipped away from its once-stable, white-male base? The timbre of the nation has permanently shifted, and the GOP is gnawing off its own fingers in panic.

Hmmmmm...that might actually create jobs, like when they need to take a leak or try to jack off with no fingers...

Most people, tragically, have no conception of the radical new, of true spiritual transformation, of seeing through our endless social constructs to the other side. Change as wild possibility has been drilled out of us by capitalism, gun lobbies, reality TV, Wal-Mart, politicians who have a vested interest in promoting stasis and preventing evolution, even going so far as to deny the latter exists at all.

If focus groups led the world, we’d have no iPhone. When you let numb groupthink rule technology, you get Microsoft. If you let conservativism rule, you get Mitt Romney, the Catholic Church, abstinence education, homophobia, sexism, monster trucks, the Iraq war, corporate groupthink, a sad, low-level hatred of anything that is not exactly like you. It’s not that stability or consistency are wrong. They can be quite wonderful. It’s that they’re just as much an illusion as anything else.

“Don’t ever change,” we write, naively, in our friends’ high school yearbooks. Oh my God. Are you insane? I can think of nothing I’d rather do.

I can think of nothing more futile to rail at or be afraid of. Change happens.

Although I DO think everything started downhill when they put the cams on top and did away with pushrods...