I’ve been thinking about the news lately. (That’s a true statement most days of the week, most weeks of the year.)
I’ve been thinking about Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s quitting, because of speech restrictions from Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s parent company.
I’ve been thinking about all the backlash on people who mostly either tried to counter the hagiography of Charlie Kirk or perhaps were venting less tactfully (I’ve been known to).
I’ve been thinking about one of my grandfathers — I’ve mentioned him before in the open air of the Internet: The one who is a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who really fought real Nazis. A conservative, a believer in freedom. I think also, like many veterans of that and other wars, he came out of World War II an atheist. (He went in a Quaker, one of the more conservative “programmed” variety, like Nixon.)
He was also a dairy farmer, part of a dairy co-op that supplied Ben & Jerry’s (well before the Unilever acquisition). I do not know what he thought about the hippies making and selling ice cream all over New England and Upstate New York, but I know he didn’t mind eating it or selling to them. (Conversely, Ben and Jerry had to know all these family dairies their milk came from weren’t exactly communes.)
I know he didn’t mind their speech. I know this because when I grew into a teenager, I took positions against what I considered abuses of authority in my small world—positions he wouldn’t take himself. And I got in trouble for them.
And he spoke up in my defense.
“What did I fight for?” my mother has quoted him from that time.
What did he fight for, I wonder. Most days of the week. Most weeks of the year.