Lately I’ve been looking at old photographs of my grandfather, specifically at his glasses. They were gold (actual gold, which is how they were made back then), and all his life he just replaced the lenses. I have photos of him as a teen, all the way up to his very last days, and the glasses are a constant, as was his hair style. I’m not sure why he never updated his glasses. The cost most probably. But when I thought about it, his glasses came back in fashion in the 1960s, with John Lennon, and then went out of fashion. Then came back with Harry Potter in the late 1990s, then went out of fashion again. Then…. Well, you get the idea.

We have concepts of ourselves that never update, and concepts that we constantly update. My grandfather, for instance, always had the very latest technological innovation. If he were alive today, he’d have been playing with Claude the day it was released. (By the way, Claude is also a woman’s name. Queen Claude of France.) He’d already have one of those made to look cute assistants working away. But change his hair style? Nope. People are like that. They have constants in their life and areas where they like flux. Societies (made of people!) are similar. Different social groups have different constants they cling to, and different areas where change is ok or even desired.

I started thinking about this recently while reading Riccardo Falcinelli’s Chromorama: how colour changed our way of seeing. In the book, he mentions a centuries-old carved wood Madonna. She’s currently wearing a white cloak, to express her purity, because that’s how we think of her now, today. The Madonna as the embodiment of purity (mostly just sexual purity, and that speaks to what Catholic society obsesses about today) . But if you peeled back the paint layers, you would next find a cloak of gold leaf, from a time when the Madonna was used to represent the Church in all her splendor. 

Under that white layer, you would then find a cloak of blue, created at a time when ultramarine was super expensive and very evil rich people (e.g., Medicis) wanted to show (to the public) a) they were rich and b) they were Christians (some things never change). Under that layer, you’d find the cloak all Madonna started out with in the beginning of Christianity – a black cloak, to foreshadow her mourning the death of her son. The Madonna never changed, but her cloak color did, and that one change to her appearance represented an entire theological shift in how she was seen and what she represented to the viewers of that figure in the Catholic culture at large. 

How we decide what is constant (or even what can be constant) and what can be changed is largely down to how we are raised up. Not many Catholics today would look at the Madonna in a blue cloak today and think “ugh, rich people trying to buy their way to heaven by enriching the church while they do evil to everyone in their society every day.” They just think, “Oh, Mary always has a blue cloak.” Or maybe, “the blue represents heaven.” Most Catholics I know can’t imagine Mary in anything but a blue cloak. Check out your Christmas pageant this year. You’ll see the blue cloak. 

That Catholics do this is not their fault. That’s the image they were raised with. By the same token, if I wore a blue woolen cape to a synagogue on a Friday night, people there might think “Oh, she’s Jewish” because the star of David and the stripes on the Israeli flag are blue. People would interpret the color in a way that made sense within the context of their community. I would not be flying “false” color. I would just be wearing a warm coat I like and largely oblivious to what people were thinking when they walked up and said “I really like your coat” but might actually be thinking something like, She’s Jewish and pro-Israel.

It’s a Pashmina – the colorful thing on her shoulder.

Fall is the time when people start to shift their wardrobes, the summer frocks of muslin and diaphanous linen shawls are traded for woollen sweaters and warm pashminas. Your makeup pallet might change to something more earth-toned (or sparkly during the holidays). Your footwear will certainly change if you live in a rainy or snowy climate! Even in nature, the leaves are turning color and falling off trees. So, while all these known constant seasonal changes are happening, it seems like a good time to revisit concepts about self. What to keep constant, what to update (if even just for a season), and what to let fall away completely?

I know a few people who have left their long-time religious house of worship, but not their respective religions, this year. They tired of going to a worship service, ostensibly about God, only to hear about political topics – not at the social afterwards, but – during the actual service and even the sermon! It’s not that political topics aren’t worthy of discussion, they simply aren’t appropriate as acts of worship. There’s a lack of boundaries. This is a very sacred space. This is a very scared act. That is a secular space. That is a secular act. So they changed what they needed to change, to keep their constant (devotion to a faith) constant.

I think the most spectacular constant / change dynamic I was privy to witness was in Sept. A couple (let’s call them Bill and Diane), with a daughter of 15, amicably divorced in February. Bill moved to town about 30 miles away in March, and sent out wedding invitations in July. “Bill and Morgan” request your presence….. We did not know, till we arrived at the church, that Morgan was a man. The wedding invitation has a unisex name, and I had assumed based on past history, Morgan would be female. Bill had kept constant his ideas about love, marriage, and  family. He merely had updated his views on who would make a suitable partner when he met this other man and “instantly knew this was true love”.  His former spouse and daughter (at the wedding) were very happy for him. As were we. 

It’s never to late to start over. Never too late to be happy.

In talking to people about the upcoming elections – and I do talk about them, in coffee houses and other appropriate spaces, mostly because I get asked about American politics, because people are angry and often want to talk to someone American about, so I provide that space (venting, sharing, discussion, I’m just there to help) – I try to stress that people should be realistic. By that I mean, asking people to update a political belief, usually (and quite strangely) is often asking people to update a constant rather than something that just is and can fluctuate. 

Political beliefs can be tied to personal identity. I vote this way because I’m …. Irish, Texan, Pentecostal, a scientist, a parent of a child with Cerebral Palsy, a senior, a person of color, poor, rich…. Etc, etc.  For Americans (and perhaps not just Americans) voting patterns (which is really what we are talking about, not political parties) become a constant. A rootedness with a specific cultural identity. If one changed one’s voting pattern, there’s often fear of a knock-on effect in other spheres (personal and cultural). But realistically, how someone votes is an updateable, fluxy part of life. It’s not a constant.

A large number of Americans are not party affiliated, and that number seems to grow every election as more and more people decide political affiliation is not a constant but something that can and should be updated as necessary. A 2022 chart from the Independent Center Older people seem more party affiliated. But we are moving to culture that views voting as something one does based on the best available options, not a party. This is really the more rational approach to all of life.

What I try to emphasize to people, to give them some hope, is that most Americans can do basic logic. 

War = higher prices at the pump, fertilizer/food shortages, higher prices for everything, including a mortgage, health care, education, child care. Tariffs = unemployment, poverty, and destruction of American farms and businesses. AI = higher costs for water and electricity, pollution and noise, and more inequality, more extreme wealth only for the Republican elites, less jobs.  

Declaring and stopping wars is Congress’s job. The Republican majority in Congress, controlling the House and Senate, have blocked ending the war 4 times

Declaring tariffs is Congress’s job. The Republican majority in Congress refused to stop the tariffs.

Declaring laws is Congress’s job. The Republican majority in Congress passed the decade-long moratorium on regulating AI, said Crypto was ok, and paid to cancel renewable energy projects.

The simple answer to fixing all of this is to vote only for Democrats for the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Irregardless (yes, it’s in the dictionary and I use it) of how Americans might categorize their political affiliation, or their feelings about democracy, or even morality, simple self-preservation indicates, a vote to elect or reelect any Republican to the US Congress is simply to continue the current path, which is suicidal. Clinging to an imagined constant (political party) over varying your voting pattern to ensure your own actual survival seems like a no brainer. But I guess we’ll see.