Being subject as I am to the same human failings as the next fellow

I feel like in real life, "good guys and bad guys" are for kids and cops.

I imagine you could argue, "Well what about Hitler? He was a bad guy." And I guess so, but I think he's more meme than man now. I want to talk about real people, not the extremes of myth and legend. Is it constructive for grownups today to think about the world in terms of good guys and bad guys?

My granddad was in the Canadian air force in WWII. I just got to spend some time with the man, and he fascinates me. He fixes bubble sextants for a hobby and has never touched the internet. At 90, he just spent a few days out in the bush (that's Canadian for "the woods") with my brother, my son, and me harvesting a few cords of wood to help heat his home this winter. He taught me how to fish, camp, and canoe. He's a treasure trove of stories, and he's a great story teller, maybe my favorite. He told me a WWII story about two men he'd known since childhood. One had lost his comrades and was quite shaken up about it, crying for hours several days in a row in the canteen. Finally, the other guy, known for being a joker, walked up to him while he was crying, and stuck a pacifier in his mouth, yelling, "Suck on that why don't you!" Everybody thought that was pretty funny and had a good laugh. It's not every day you get a prop comic in the military I guess. My granddad also talked about Eisenhower and said the man knew how to deal with PTSD. He'd walk up to whoever was melting down, slap them, and tell them to snap out of it.

Now, I'm a buttery soft progressive, and I find these war stories as horrifying as they are fascinating. But they also make a weird kind of sense to me. And they help me make sense of my grandfather. Like many conservatives, he believes in strict hierarchies and tight ships. He feels that way about race, gender, and office. Everybody has roles they ought to play based on their categories, and that's how we keep things running smoothly. If somebody steps out of line, you make them step back in line. My grandfather's nickname is Rocky for reasons he refuses to talk about, but I'm pretty sure they involved hitting people. Listening to his stories, I was struck by a few things. For starters, I have to remember that everybody got roped into WWII. He and all his friends spent formative years in the military. The military, of all institutions, believes in straight lines and hierarchies. It also believes in the use of force. We call his generation the greatest because they took down Hitler. Well they couldn't have done it without strict hierarchies and violence.

That was an intense time for other reasons too. It was a time of scarcity, uncertainty, and xenophobia. Xenophobia is bad, obviously, but doesn't it make a certain kind of sense that somebody who made it through WWII would struggle with it? It was a fight explicitly drawn along racial and national lines.

When I get worked up about political perspectives I don't agree with, I have to remember that real people who experienced a lifetime of real events have those opinions. Political ideas that seem xenophobic, sexist, violent, or greedy may not strike me as the most constructive direction for us to go in the future. But wouldn't it be ironic for me to write off the people who have them as bad guys. My granddad is worried that Muslims are outbreeding Christians and this spells doom for the white race. I don't share his concern. I think we're all people and it doesn't bother me when anybody has babies. But at the same time that he holds this belief, let me tell you about the church he loves going to every week. I was interested to see just how diverse it was. Red and yellow, black and white. So I think there's an element too of believing things in theory, but in practice, face to face where it really counts, I think we tend to be better.

So yes, he has a political idea that seems a little, well, hateful to me, but I do not consider my grandfather a bad guy. Far from it. He's incredible. He's one of my favorite people on this planet. His political ideas are fascinating clues about the time, place, and people who made him who he is.

So that's why I feel like part of growing up is realizing there's no such thing as good guys and bad guys.