I do, especially when somebody's got a "good heart" and coming from the right place--trying to solve problem, trying to lantern through issue. There are days (Mama said there'd be days like this) when our radios and computers are way more strange looking stomachs and belated comments than moving forward.
Sometimes it feels like the ozone hole is right on top of us or all the plane activity ruined the layers of sphere and gravity is experiencing too much interference from space winds. Othertimes it seems like everybody picked a day to change it up.
Sometimes our nation just gets stuck mid-tug-o'-war. And there have been times when there just isn't any (Yes we have no bananas). We went through that drastically pre-Reagan. We went through it, I think in a class-specific way, in the Clinton days. There are always people that get through it. Sometimes the bridgework between people and resources happens like popcorn popping, othertimes people hole up; just not interested. Activists and artists really "feel" more of an isolation than audience and interaction.
Sometimes the country is flummuxed, like voting won't matter...striking won't matter...marriage won't matter...nothing matters. That feeds complacency and a sort of primitive fatalism. The take what you get mentality (beggars can't be choosers) goes along with degrees of socialism and abject poverty. And the super-rich doesn't have to "care".
There is a horrified feeling when someone realizes, I smoked, now I am eaten with cancers. Consequences of actions...there have been times decent-living people without resources have been railed upon, and yet the policy-fairies must've ran away with the reality. People who've worked hard, held the line on safety and success moan like an old dog being kicked.
It's not an "AHA" moment. It's more like one caring person taking in the enormity of metropolis.
Underdog movies become popular; independent projects come to light; re-runs re-run. No one wants to say out loud or too loud, um, there's not even one strawberry. Or, the house is gone. It looks like just ours, it looks like everything else is the same.
Dig deep. This too shall pass.
There'd been reluctance. And denial. The teacher was wedged between an education system bulging with resources held up by disputes about how to classify, and, the rest of the world. It took the better part of a month for on-boarders to gather supplies and get permission slips signed.
The class worked in silence after the teacher asked, Do we want to just sit around itchy and scratching all day, or, do we want to learn?
"Well, you know when Otis and I were diagnosed as having HIV infection, I began to look around for community support. The director if St. John's Church mentioned an organization that he thought he had heard about-- Tennessee AIDS Project. Of course, that turned out not to be the name, but he did have the phone number for a woman, Elaine Shuman, who worked at the medical school. She was coordinator of a very loose group of medical students, psychologists and other professionals--they hadn't actually met in several months. Elaine convened the group for their first real meeting as a result of my call.
"We've had several meetings. The first were just feelers, you know. I keep pushing for things like bylaws, Robert's Rules of Order, and so on, and people just say, 'Oh, we don't really need that.' All we have in terms of a budget is about three hundred dollars. The organization office is basically Elaine Shuman's dining table. She will be leaving shortly, and in all probability, the office will move to Bettie Lee's dining room" (149, My Own Country).
On a history-oriented newsletter thing this morning a highlight of this day in history (1777) was the use of the Stars and Stripes (Old Glory, Our Flag) for the first time in battle. Symbol of hope, taking on more than ethereal meaning. A lot of organizations start with an idea or a need, a symbolic commitment. And then, the work of sustaining.
Battle-weary, war torn, scared to death of crossing a parking lot for all the ruckus that our contentious selves can/do make, I have found myself a time or two in a room full of "power people." It was like sending people to the moon, that fresh and innovative, when a mediating-person/bridgeworker started with awe, respect, appreciation...at the risk of seeming child-like, fake and dramatic, or wanting something and so ooowing and awing/kissing ass. In fact, in academic and non-academic interactions with the have accomplished much the power people themselves are typically not after anything themselves. From the boss who started a gas station between counties, to expanders of product line and inventors, people get to a place in life where it is what it is.
It kind of feels like that with our country this election time.
Right, right brain keeps remembering. Without sounding like a child, or a black woman. God forbid. Well, not God but
It got like that in Academia for a little while. In an effort to get as many votes as possible, appeal to as many students as possible it got universal. And that's okay. Big common humanity themes, it's important to go there too. Especially as people work to lift selves out of proverbial swamps and literal dusty places. But. There was a void space or a disconnect. People were saying I feel ya, but like mannequins. People were making connections between themes and issues but it took discussions to abstract and more ideal.
The first people to re-sensualize got taken aback looks and a few ooos. The first people to reclaim personal identity often prefaced "it" with the context of broader identity--nationalism, religious, race. The first people to promote loud and proud weren't always the ones in business meetings or classrooms with lights like xray spotlights. And the first people to reclaim personal identity in an increasingly corporatizing world didn't always feel "good" about it.
The propensity of audience to tune out as irrelevant was a smalling. The ability of audience to pack as something that is one, not personal identity, could be crushing. The crusade of the personal identity, it was a thing. Often, at best, someone would chance an it matters, or, you said what I wanted to say. That was at first. But like subjective writing had blended with reportorial, it grew into style and then activism. Like babies are embryonic, then newborn, then active little humans called toddlers.
People encountered people, through reading, writing, listening. And people also got insight into other places and cultures, or people of other places and cultures. We started to hear disownings too. That person who...well that's dissident in our place, that's not representing us. And it turned out, there's incredibly long and complicated tradition of personal identity being sublimated to dominant culture; "heresy," "heretics," "lunacy", "lunatics"; dismissal, excommunicating, and violence against. In America thinkers and some speakers wrestled mightily with a kind of guilt about the freedom(s) of individuality. And we were witness to charisma and cult of personality influencing followers.
These aspects of culture-being were on minds in considering presidency too. Potential candidates were often white washed or blanded to create the image of someone on par with the mythical Washington. It was a whole system of positing the right-looking person for the job. It got all entangled with entitlement issues and America's obsession with to change or not to change.
And in some cases the effect of even slightly different or too personal brought similar reaction to the orphan on the corner or the multi-racial sorta religious but not a practicing homosexual with yaddah yaddah family and on and on. Some could relate, some boos, some laughs, a lot of you're on your own with that one. That brought up some bitterness and a kind of backlash against what's been the ideal. And it created the kind of vacuum in which people can get away with letting Iran have nukes; dismantling defense; celebration of tyranny; something quite slippery doing away with democracy. In that, too, there was the resurgence of machinery.
So yeah, the public sphere and governance of a democracy also wrestles mightily with the personal and personality. And while politics and academics should not be one and the same, just having elections does not intelligent discussion make. Too often it breaks down into ignoring and/or violence. And so far in history our young democracy has not proven to be all that different from fractured, frictive ruckus "communities" of the past.
For me, after swaths of broad learning and liberality, I was glad to re-frame my brain with context. And parallels. God gave us all context in creation. Our country's founders gave us context of Independence but with the framework of being one nation under God. Our politics give us fork in the road at every issue and decision-point, that's a context. Our freedoms come with responibilities--a balancing context. All that at the core of me as a person steadies and there's no need to see the ruckus as the context. That's really been the abiding Republican party ticket too. And it felt to me like all that back to basics plus respecting others' American lifestyle choices was where we were at before 9112001. Not that terrorism won, but it has taken us a while to even consider ourselves as a nation without that context.
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