The "Oh, Grow Up" Election
We are at turning point in American history, I think, and might I suggest that the dynamic which is powering this turn is the contrast between Toughness and Sensitivity.
I was raised in a world which placed a high value on Toughness, and little on Sensitivity. My father was a very, very tough man. I don’t mean that he was tough on me, or that he wanted me to be tough. He was tough on himself. Toughness was the central virtue of his philosophy. He lived a difficult life in the time that I knew him, and his system of belief centered on two things: 1) service to your community, and 2) doing whatever had to be done to reach tomorrow.
This is the essence of toughness: No matter what happens, you go on toward your goals. My father died on a Sunday evening. I was a young writer; I had an article due for Esquire magazine the next day, and I hadn’t written it yet. That article went off on Monday morning. No matter what happens, you don’t make excuses. You do what you have to do.
It is difficult to explain how central this idea was to him. We saw evidence of it several times every day. When his feet hurt he would pull out a box cutter and carve on his feet. We pulled rotten teeth with pliers, the kids did. All of his real teeth were long gone before I knew him. Things went wrong; you just went on. The world was a tough place; you had to deal with it. What was important was that you not back away from the challenge, because if you backed away, things were just going to get worse.
My father was quite clever in small things and he had many good values, such as an almost limitless willingness to help his neighbors, but he was not a wise man; I am not trying to be hard on him or to criticize him, but he was not. He had a very poor understanding of how the world works. Confronted with any challenge, his instinct was to bull forward. Many times he could have benefited from more reflection, and sometimes from more sensitivity. He didn’t have a real philosophy, that comes to you from examination of the world at large; he had an instinctive philosophy, a guttural extension of what seems right from where you are. The greatest sin, other than selfishness, was to give in to fear, and then not do what you had to do.
I remember I said to him one time, when I was at the age when I was trying to figure out the world, "You know what your problem is, Dad?"
"No, son, what is my problem?"
"You’re just too poor to get rich."
He liked that. It had to do with his toughness. He had no operating capital, no space in which to maneuver to make things better. He just had to deal with where he was, and he was going to be there until he died, and he knew it.
  Another definition of toughness is "the willing acceptance of suffering." If Dad could do anything the hard way or the easy way, he always did it the hard way, because he assumed axiomatically that accepting the hard parts of the bargain up front would lead to better results in the long run. A willingness to accept suffering may mean the willing acceptance of suffering on your own part, in the pursuit of a better life, or it may mean that you expect others to accept suffering, as well. Toughness sometimes competes with sensitivity, and in this competition toughness has been taking a terrible beating for the last 50 years. I think that our society has been operating without any functional definition of toughness, and, because we lack any definition of toughness, we lack any sense of its worth. I have dealt many times with people who questioned whether there was any such thing as toughness, in a meaningful sense. One thing they will say is that everybody thinks they are tough.
; Well, everybody thinks they are smart, too, but that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as intelligence. A great many people who are not attractive may imagine that they are attractive, but that does not mean there is no such attribute.
Intelligence, beauty and toughness exist everywhere around us, and, as many different people may lay claim to different kinds of intelligence and different kinds of beauty, so too may many people claim different types of toughness. But the determination and the ability to overcome difficulties is an important variable among us. Those who give up in the face of obstacles will absolutely fail. Toughness is a trait that a healthy culture must foster in its citizens.
Tough times, of course, make tough people. The generation that went through the Depression of the 1930s and then World War II came out tougher than boiled leather. They believed that any form of complaint was weakness. Somebody smashed you in the mouth? Get up and kick him in the balls. Somebody insulted your appearance? Insult his religion in return, or his girlfriend, or his personal hygiene—but whatever you do, don’t complain about it. "Grow up," we were told a dozen times a week. To complain about anything was childish; grow up.
They were TOO tough. Their belief in toughness as the lynchpin of all values was destructive of other values. There was a pivot point, beginning about 1963, when the people of my generation began to reject toughness and embrace sensitivity.
I am not in any way suggesting that we were wrong to do this. We were right to do this. As a culture, we did need to learn to be more sensitive to the suffering of others. There was too much tolerance for violence. There was too much tolerance for injustice. There was too much tolerance for cruelty, and for bullying. Our society needed more sensitivity to these issues. My generation, the Baby Boomers, was right to nurture the culture of sensitivity that we did in fact foster. Parental methods which had been accepted for thousands of years became child abuse. My generation led that change, and we were right to lead that change. It needed to be changed.
; But we didn’t know when to shut up about it.
  We won the culture war, and then we tried to win it again, and win it again, and win it again. Each battle was for a smaller victory than the last. As toughness had once been the central virtue which trumped all other virtues, now sensitivity became the trump card. A public person was supposed to shudder at the idea of accidentally saying something which offended someone—and, in fact, most of us did. We had to learn to look at every word we wrote as a black person would look at it, as a gay person might look at it, as a woman might look at it, as a gay black woman might look at it, to make certain it was not offensive from any angle. Uncharted classes of protected citizenry arose—disabled people, the elderly, transgendered people, mentally ill people, short people. Can’t call them midgets anymore; it’s offensive. When I was young we were taught to refer to exceptionally slow learners as "retarded", so that we wouldn’t offend them.
  This kind of sensitivity is inherently selective. Despite the explosion of protected classes, I still belong to a dozen or more groups which can be openly insulted without restraint. I’m a fat guy; fat people are still fair game. People say false, derogatory and hurtful things about statisticians, think nothing of it. People on the coasts, people who have never been to Kansas and know next to nothing about it, will not hesitate to reduce us to their own bigoted images of the place. It annoys me, but you know; it’s normal. I’m a member of the media elite; I can’t complain about us.
While the belief in the primacy of sensitivity has permeated the political culture, the belief in toughness has not gone away; it has merely gone into hiding. Among the places where toughness has gone to hide is the sports world.
You cannot be successful in sports if you are not tough. If you make excuses, you are always going to have an excuse. The referee blows a call against you, you don’t complain about it; you work harder on the next play. Everybody in sports understands that, so the sports world does not tolerate excuses. We value toughness.
; I have written about this before, but when I played high school football, not well enough to talk about, but I did, the coach would put us through long practices in the hot sun without water. Across the nation a few high school athletes would die every year from this practice, but football coaches just ignored that and went on. When I have written about this before, younger people will say to me, looking puzzled, "But what was the point of that?"
  It was to make you tough. It was to make you say to yourself "No matter how hard this is, I will not quit. I will carry on." It was to make you a little bit more like those men in the trenches in World War II, who didn’t quit no matter how tough the living conditions were. I quit. I wasn’t that tough.
The long practices without water were stupid, because they carried an unacceptable risk of serious health consequences, but on the other end of that, about 2008, there were a spate of stories about football coaches "abusing" their players by doing things like shoving them, yelling at them, and making them run punitive laps for minor offenses. That was stupid, too. The notion that a football coach can’t kick a player in the ass to make him realize he is not working hard enough is ridiculous. The player is not injured. The player does not suffer any pain that he will not recover from in a matter of minutes. If he doesn’t want to put up with it, he can quit the team like I did.
Bobby Knight, one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, was forced out of his job in part because he grabbed a player and pushed him, impatiently, where he was supposed to be as a part of a defensive scheme. That was the political world trying to dominate the sports world, trying to tell us what our values needed to be and how to fix them. OK, you won that one, but 2016 was the year in which the debt came due on that. (Why this paragraph is in italics is a complete mystery. I didn't put it in italics, and it shows as normal on the editing screen. For some reason it has italics here.)
  Toughness has remained a key virtue in many places in American culture, if not throughout American culture. Black Americans, still living in tough times, still value toughness within their own culture—as do all cultures of poor and disadvantaged people. The popular television show "Fear Factor" was 100% about toughness. People did not cease to be tough, nor did they stop believing in toughness. Only the most political one-half of the Democratic Party denied the value of toughness. Everybody else held on to it.
Look, there is a lot of Donald Trump that I despise. I don’t admire his toughness. He doesn’t insult people because he is tough; it’s because he’s a jackass. But he is a pretty tough jackass. He doesn’t back down when he is challenged. He doesn’t make excuses. It doesn’t make him a bully or a criminal; it just makes him a jackass.
He is famously willing to offend people. I’m not going to vote for that, but I think a lot of people did, and I get that. In some ways, Americans need to be tougher than we have been. We need to be tougher in negotiating trade deals. We need to be tougher in enforcing immigration laws. We need to be tougher in insisting that our allies pay their NATO fees.
Back when there were hard-ass managers, baseball teams used to alternate between hard-ass managers and nice-guy managers. When the hard-ass manager offended enough people, they’d hire the nice guy. When the players walked all over the nice guy, they’d hire a hard-ass. There aren’t really any hard-ass managers any more, like there used to be.
This is the other end of 1963. People older than me still believe in that old, 1950s toughness. The younger people don’t have any experience with it. They can’t really imagine how tough those old geezers were, or what it was like to live in a world in which they made all the rules. I believe that this election, more than any other one thing, was an emphatic rejection of global sensitivity. This was the "Oh, grow up" election. Somebody mocked you because you have arthrogryposis? Well, what did you do to him? Somebody kicked you in the teeth because you claimed to be a war hero and waved the flag in his face? Grow up, McCain; it was past time for somebody to tell you to stuff that flag up your ass. You are offended because he speaks crudely about the sexuality of different women? What, you didn’t know that men did that?
Pretending that men don’t do that is not "sensitivity"; it is pretense. The better class of men do not do that, but most people aren’t deeply offended by it; that’s the real lesson here. Grow up. People say offensive things; it’s just words. It is not a good thing, but you’re too tough a person to be complaining about it.
Now open for comments. Please be sure to tell me that Donald Trump isn't tough; nobody has suggested that yet.