Languishing in the bed reading the wonderful comments from yesterday's celebration of our common experience of being lonely in a loudmouthed angry bellicose world, I have tried to shake the tune that has stuck with me that was posted yesterday in One Pissed Off Liberal's diary. I can't.
I think for most of us the fear of dying has been balanced by the fear of living fully in the world. For me, it had to do with taboos and secrets that we keep. Then it was the anger that went along with being branded one thing or another. I have been yelling at the world for longer than I can remember that you don't know me, and you have no right to sum me up in a phrase, a label or an emblem. I'm an exhippie, but I'm also an ex-stewardess, an ex-wife, an ex car salesman, an ex cheerleader, a former music student, an artist, a writer, a photographer, a blogger, a perpetual student, a teacher, and many more. I have a page in my book called Delusions of Grandeur on which I've scanned an image of eight of the business cards I could find from the years between 1980 and 2000 and you would be hard-pressed to stereotype me from those cards at all.
Yet this is how we function. We make decisions based on signposts. Danger lurks around any particular turn if we aren't sure what enemy lurks behind the curve. I suggest that it might be that we are too busy trying to get somewhere to realize that we have no place we really need to go except to just be where we are. Try talking to the person to your right or left. They are probably waiting for you to do so.
I find signs useful of course. But slogans can divide as much as unite. It depends so much on how we understand the message. What those who are happy with slogans can't seem to get is that we live in the middle between the signposts. Polarization doesn't help us at all. It is too bad that we are all so worried about what might happen to us - the Party of Fear has been good at making us afraid.
Love does not get puffed up!...lol.
The house I live in is owned by a 96 year old woman. She gets more fear-mongering mail in each mailbox than I could stand to see in a year. I am trying to keep from being angry over this. I realize that she is too old to understand how computers generate the red and blue ink that is made to appear as if it were personally addressed to her. I get that she feels sorry for the poorly disfigured children whose photos appear on the envelopes. I even get the cleverness with which the solicitors affix various pretty stamps in order to distinguish their expensive envelope from the stack.
What I don't get is why this is not illegal.
I know a few songwriters. I'd love to challenge you to write a ditty about this. I came up with a few words to start you off:
"Stop scaring my mother-in-law, stop hounding my dad. Stop scaring my grandmother to death. Stop saying it's all she wrote. Stop telling them lies."
I didn't get further than that. I'm not a songwriter. I wish I could do better than that. But I can suggest that it's a problem that ought to be addressed.
In any one day there are 30-40 pieces of mail. At least two robo-calls. Some personal calls from the RNC, the College Republicans, the whatever foundation, Newt Gingrich, and all the rest. How do they get away with this?
I am aware that the person who owns this house doesn't even know you can block these calls. She doesn't have caller ID. Or call waiting for that matter. She's 96. She came up in a hardscrabble world and made a good life for her daughter and her husband working her fingers to the bone making draperies and Vogue dresses and supporting the church functions. The casserole dishes and cake stands are everywhere.
Now she has taken in strays. Not just myself. I was not intentionally taken in, but ended up here after she had a stroke and is not sure whether she's ever coming back home.
She'll have to have a companion, and I'm a good candidate since I'm otherwise homeless, jobless, compassionate, and I love cats. She took in one which had a litter and she now has five, plus my three. Hers are feral and afraid of me most of the time, and full of fleas and bad behavior. Mine are fluffy, spoiled and not unaccustomed to new places to live. We've been in sort of a hard place lately, my cats and I.
I am, however, not scared of dying so much as I'm scared of not finishing what I started years ago. In 1972 I began to write in a journal. I continued to write as I navigated the world as one of the first baby-boomer generations to push our way through the world. My realization that people make money studying what the effect of all these masses of consumers has on our culture made me furious. Not because I was one of the groups identified, but precisely because I was incensed that I had been put in a "group" at all.
I have tried to have it both ways before. I can hear you saying that I am not making sense because on the one hand I'm talking about the "group" that makes up the baby boomer generation and on the other hand I'm angry because I am identified as part of a group. Yep. That's what I'm doing. Trying to have it both ways.
If we don't try to see both sides of something how can we understand it? If we realize that we as individuals are not good at always being as discerning as we should be, but that as a rule a good smile and a warm greeting can be the most disarming thing we can do, perhaps we can be better at this than we were. I notice that the kids protesting have a few things in common. They keep their hands in their pockets. They smile. They aren't pushing and shoving and standing on a box shouting down. They are often raising their voices up, out, across a divide into the crowd. The democratic principles that we've seen are instructive. Encouraging. Enlightening.
Try something for me. Try not saying my hometown is a Sewer. I chose it. I came here on purpose. I once became so angry at Markos for calling Don Siegleman a crook that I couldn't write here for ages. Then I chose to write here, and from here, and it didn't matter. We always learn from our mistakes when we listen to what we say and thoughtfully rephrase it. The people jumping on Michael Moore are wrong. They don't know what he has done for us. I do. There always has to be the first voice, as the dean of students told me a few days ago.
I have to get out of the bed today and go check on some others who are less fortunate than I. I will return to see what the world is up to.
Thanks to all.
10:35 AM PT: Hey, I've forgotten how to insert a photo link - can anyone quickly help me?
3:42 PM PT: As a quick thank you to all who've commented and been so nice today, I'm sending you something I found. I wish I could take credit for it. Alas, I'm neither that good or that bold. But she can be found and thanked separately. It's a blog called Adobe Soup, and the post I link is about expressing my love...(or hers, or whatever - you'll see) http://adobesoup.com/...