Inherited Certainty

Yesterday, in the same hallway, I passed two kids from opposite ends of the political spectrum, each one fully costumed in conviction, and it stopped me in a way that surprised me, because I've walked past plenty of political shirts and hats before without giving them a second thought. One wore a MAGA hat paired with a shirt honoring Charlie Kirk, stacking one symbol on top of another until there wasn't much room left for anything else to be true about him that day. The other wore a shirt cursing the president by name, a single blunt statement instead of a layered one, but no less absolute in what it assumed the reader already agreed with. Neither outfit made an argument, and neither seemed to think it needed to, because the case, whatever it was, had already been closed for both of them somewhere else, long before either one got dressed that morning.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn the next few paragraphs into a takedown of one side or the other, and that is not what I'm trying to do. I know one of these kids personally, and I'm not going to name him or pretend I have access to what's actually in his thoughts, or the other kid's either. What I do know is that neither of them built those beliefs from scratch sitting alone in a room somewhere, because nobody does that, and what I saw in that hallway wasn't really about Trump or Kirk or any single issue on its own. It was about inheritance, the almost invisible way political certainty gets handed down to a person before they're old enough to have earned it through their own thinking.

Kirk was assassinated a little over a year ago. That fact alone changes what wearing his name might mean to someone, whatever they believe about the man himself, which is part of why I sat with this column for a while instead of writing it the next morning.

Here in Tahlequah, and across the Cherokee Nation, politics and identity are braided together tighter than in a lot of places I've read about, where family, faith, land, tribe, and loyalty to where you come from aren't abstractions but dinner table facts that shape how a person sees almost everything else. I want to be clear that none of that is the problem I'm describing, because traditional values like respect for elders, loyalty to community, and a sense of obligation to something bigger than yourself are not what's breaking my generation. What's breaking us is something narrower and easier to miss, which is a position getting handed down with the exact same weight and certainty as a value, so that a kid ends up inheriting not just "family matters" but a fully formed verdict on which specific candidate is good and which one is evil, a conclusion that belongs to someone else's life experience and gets passed along before it's ever been tested against the kid's own.

That transfer happens through mechanisms so ordinary that nobody bothers to name them, which is part of what makes them so effective, since it isn't dramatic indoctrination but dinner conversation, the news that's already playing when you walk into the living room, and an algorithm that learned what your household already believes and keeps feeding it back a little louder every year until the volume feels like truth. By the time a kid is old enough to pick out a shirt for school, the argument behind it has usually already been made by somebody else, and all that's left for him to do is wear the verdict.

None of this means I'm asking anyone to abandon where they come from, and I want to be direct about that, because I'm not asking the kid in the MAGA hat to stop honoring his family's politics, and I'm not asking the kid in the other shirt to stop being angry about things that genuinely make him angry. Rejecting your roots outright isn't the same thing as thinking for yourself, and I don't believe that's actually the answer either, since plenty of people who reject everything their family ever believed just end up exactly as certain, only certain in the opposite direction, which isn't freedom so much as the same costume turned inside out and worn with just as little question. What I'm asking for instead is narrower and, honestly, harder to actually practice, which is holding onto the values you were raised with while still insisting on earning your own conclusions, because loyalty to your community is not the same thing as loyalty to a narrative you happened to be handed. You can love where you're from and still ask why about the things you were taught to believe without question, and that single question, asked seriously and repeated often, is not an act of rebellion against your family but the minimum requirement of actually thinking for yourself.

So here's what I'd ask of the kid in the hat, and the kid in the shirt, and every other kid like them, including myself more often than I'd like to admit. Could he take off the hat, put down the shirt, and explain his politics to a stranger using only his own reasoning, with no borrowed lines, no family script, and no algorithm feeding him the next talking point to repeat. If the honest answer is no, I don't think that makes him a failure or a lost cause, since it probably just means the real work hasn't started yet, but I do think it means the work is worth starting, and soon, before the costume becomes something he never actually chose for himself.

-Luke H. Johnson