Not ready for a dialogue of opposites, old and young, one party is defensive, another is guilty, both are angry. Their speech is self justification, blaming or lording it over each other, the youthful Jacob Reiff against the entire body of Philadelphia Reformed Elders. Boehm later says they weren't elders at all. But when they acted as such they became such. Black/white,immigrant/native conversation has similar contexts. The chief flaw in generalizing particular to universal is that one immigrant is fine and Ben Franklin has no problem, but 50,000 Germans make him fear his way of life will fall. Franklin's rhetoric against the Germans was all argument against the man. They were illiterate, dumpy, crude, boorish, "typical Germans." The "typical" quote reveals a world of imposture, as Obama said, his grandmother was a "typical white person." Typical German. These types are only rhetorical, that is, if society refers to one as "typical" they are free to say so back, like chimps throwing nuts at each other. By extension, one Latin Ameican illegal is fine. Five hundred men at the corner jumping in front of cars, soliciting jobs, makes for fear. The mythical white grandmother personified in Obama's memory, afraid of young black men in twos and threes on the street, shows the divide of the problem because nobody will admit that fear is respect. A cop at a traffic stop or going into a store sweeps the scene with his eyes, identifying the elements. "Typical cop." Fear keeps him safe. There is no inherent unity among people except one created by courtesy and mutual respect, even if grown up together within a community and known since childhood. Otherwise you are an outsider and even more suspect. Every day eyes sweep the scene, discriminate street people from immigrant workers to guys with beer cans in paper bags going or coming to work at motels from meth users and mentally challenged squatters along the canals. Feathering your nest with sociology does not prove you are civilized or righteous.
An elder is a judge not easily swayed with honey since he is in pain most of the time and not thinking of an all night drive to Fresno being fun. Elders don't walk at midnight to the corner bar for a beer. Jacob Reiff had the indignity to be called an elder at 27, the age of his first trip back to Europe about 1727, followed immediately by a second. He was an elder since they called him that, but he was not an elder ordained. His outrage at being charged under false pretenses by the Philadelphia Reformed Elders is a manly enough. The thing that gets our goat hundreds of years after he has returned from Holland is that the charges, just like the defamations of Germans (Indians, Irish, Blacks, Latin Americans) in Franklin's letters, continue. Elders are finite and know it. That is the only basis on which they can be trusted. Certainly we do not agree with them about anything else, being visionary and rash and thinking we can Patch the Crack in the Bell. The basis of trust is pain. None of the problems of employment, housing, environment, energy can be solved without it. Sacrifice is due. Politics urges loss of nothing. None of them are elders.
