There has been this nagging thought in the back of my head for years now. I may have recounted this experience before, because it nags at me, but I think I’m coming to the place of extracting the thorn.
Several years ago a spiritual leader at one of the Christian organizations I worked for told me that he didn’t think it was a good idea for me to be in a mentoring position with young highschool kids. The position that I wanted involved physical labor and conversation a few hours each day. His primary contentions were my radical beliefs: deeply empathizing with Buddhism and loving Henry David Thoreau (also having a nose-ring, which Lamar later removed with wire cutters). He felt that I might endanger his and the organization’s already precarious position with conservative parents. But Walden, really? Every highschool sophomore in California reads Walden! Maybe the reason I could never make sense of it is because it really didn’t make sense. Time to move on, right?
But here’s the deal. He was right. I am a loose canon. Having my own thoughts and wanting to express them is dangerous… but awesome. For the first time in way too many years I am not under the payroll of any Christian organization– it is such an incredibly liberating feeling! As I said to my dad last week: “Dear Church, Glad you’ve decided you want young adults in your organization. Now that you have us, take note: we have opinions, we have politics, we are college educated; we are here and we are LOUD.” Our church, The Church… everybody needs to make some changes.
Honestly, I don’t know if that will get us anywhere– and maybe I just like to buck the system just for the sake of being a loose cannon. Maybe this is my long-delayed teenage rebellion. Does it really matter? I’m so over subconscious motivation, these days I just try to do what feels right.
Also, I can’t remember how to break this off into pieces so that the whole long post doesn’t appear at once (you know, how to create the “jump”) so if anyone has advice on this it would make everyone’s eyes bleed less, I am certain.
Today I had a decidedly un-American experience. A relative stranger asked me for help. Not a creepy stranger, not a weird favor, just needed a ride to the VW dealership several blocks down. I was headed in exactly that direction and was so shocked that I said yes; I’m glad I did it. I had to ask him where he was from, and he mentioned he had only been in the U.S. for about fifteen years; he was born and raised in India. Of course, I already knew he was a foreigner– true Americans observe a strict taboo against helping each other.
As I drove myself home I started thinking about the way that a small group (maybe a large group, I don’t know) of people at my church want to bar “neighborhood” people from receiving free dinners at our Big Wednesday night program or from coming at all, really. These neighborhood people have been labeled (by some) as “Dave Kerr’s People,” as though a pastor offering hope and a free meal to people in need was something preposterous (he associates himself with sinners and the mentally ill!). At first I thought that the issue was pure classism, but I think that today I changed my mind. It’s not just about being prejudiced against people of another socioeconomic status, its the inability to understand what it is like to trust oneself to the goodness of a fellow human being.
And that, my friends, seems like a spiritually impoverishing state of affairs.
This is what I’ve been thinking about lately (while I should be thinking about papers, of course). I tend to see hip-hop/rap music as poetry, and I’ve become fascinated and maybe even fixated by what it has to say about community, national identity, and of course, the narration of survival. I’ll qualify that, because obviously “Blame it on the al-al-al-al-al-alcholol” isn’t exactly poetic.
I don’t think I have any awesome analysis yet, but it’s worth checking out these songs and thinking about them a little, even if you disagree with the politics.
You may, like my husband, think I’m digging too deep into something that is meant to be “entertainment,” but I’m not quite there isn’t something to be grasped here about us, the community of people who calls themselves Americans.
I was writing a little check today (incidentally, Rebecca is headed to Ghana this summer) and flashed back to a childhood incident when, with no small amount of disapproval, my mother pointed out a woman’s hyphenated name on some sort of legal tender and remarked “you can tell what kind of woman she is.” That probably went along with the conversation (again, with my mother) where I was informed that, no matter how many degrees I might achieve or what sort of career I might have, I would be my parents’ responsibility until I had a husband to be responsible for me. I remember remarking, not very kindly, that I was quite certain I could eventually manage without some form of patriarchy peering over my shoulder.
A few summers ago, when I was working at Calvin Crest, a fellow staffer who I barely knew noticed me in a tank top and exclaimed, “Oh my god! You don’t shave your armpits?! I love you!!” and that sorta made me uncomfortable too. Sometimes I feel like thinking a woman is really cool because she doesn’t shave whatever part of her body without really knowing what’s going on in her head is not so terribly far removed from trying to teach your daughter that hyphenating your name somehow makes you less respectable as a woman/wife. Whether it’s for the better or for the worse, aren’t we still just judging women by superficial and non-consequential markers?
Of course, most of you wouldn’t ever make such an exclamation because you just think it’s gross. To you I say: I have really sensitive skin!
