Saw your note in the paper about PSU. I was born in Grants Pass and grew up around these parts—Vancouver, Portland, Seattle.
Watched the margin become the norm. Not that it should be one way or another—liberal vs. conservative—then again it never is really one or the other, neither with ideas nor humans. I'm just saying that thirty years ago you could bank on a general appreciation for the family and today it's just another option. It's not seen as the building block of society.
Who knows if that is good or bad, but some things flow from it and one I see is this: excruciating loneliness. People are lonely. They feel lonely. When they find themselves in the middle of the clique—where they belong! they have learned the rules to stay! to reign!—they don't wanna leave it. The wolves howl at the edge of the encampment, you know. I get that people are lonely in families, but I think when the family was seen as the center people had a clear sense of place, role, and manner of behavior expected of them in society.
In place of more families, sometimes the clubs and cliques look like neighborhoods; friend groups, coworkers, protestant churches; evangelical "movements." One that I was batting at like a dying moth for a while is along the highway in N. Seattle. Unfair to define it according to myself, but damn Peter, being around them made me lonely. Nonetheless I took an art class and volunteered for the soup kitchen and made donations and read poetry at their open mic. The nicest clique leader was a beautiful woman who also had red hair, like myself, and I walked with her sometimes up and down Aurora to visit some people who lived in the hotels and try and see what they needed, how we could help that day.
I'm getting off track. A little more about me.
I like coffee and walking. Used to read more. Now I work & take care of my family. My husband is an armchair philosopher, but—I like to think—a good one. I'm a linguist and very argumentive. I question everything. I like ideas but get hot pretty easily, it's a bad quality. I'm working on it with the philosopher and our offpsring.
Yes, we're married. And I suppose I am older than PSU's average philosophy student, but your letter still touched a nerve, because I feel like what was happening in your day was also happening a few short years prior, in mine.
My women's studies class was probably the clearest case-in-point. We were meant to read up on, write about, and present a group of women—any women—in society. There was one other person in class not gung-ho about abortion but he acted alone because I was too chicken to voice my doubts about the accuracy of its current meaning in society. He got all the hate, all the heat. He wasn't even pro-life, he was just like "can we rethink this?" In another time he'd have been burned at the stake. Inside, I was grateful. The current assomtion—that you agree until saying otherwise—let me hide.
As it was he dropped the class.
It was in women's studies I learned about the comfort women of Japan, and how the cruelty of war and culture made the soldiers insane, how the women were hired to hold the men to earth, to try to entice them stay human.
But the women were treated as cruelly as the P.O.W.s, often worse, and the ones who lived to tell were as destroyed as the soldiers who used them.
Why bring this up? I guess it's because there's a lot of ways of looking at the world, and feminism is just one of them. If the cruel are getting crueler, don't you think it's time to ask how are we all working together to make that happen? Not "more feminism is sure to instill kindness in our nation" as we lose the men to porn, violence, despair, ineptitude.
When I was at university I took one single philosophy course and recall that we began at Descartes and that the professor was a lech. No slant on you. Later in grad school via Wittgenstein I learned some of the basic shape of thought over time, enough to lick the ice cream cone of the imagination of man, enough to write my paper-book, my thesis mostly about how ideas and reality influence each other and specifically how that happened at the Panama Canal.
I learned enough to lodge Thomas More into the jigsaw approximately where he fit, and to increase my distaste for Utopia and all the Utopianism I saw within myself.
It would be easier, not to think. Or to be 100% Utopian or 100% Dystopian Zombie. But I'm a little of both and a lot more of something. Or maybe all something else with adopted traces of both.
Through Utopia I also discovered the Simulacra, thinking about it one yoga session, about how the Fendi on Rihanna's clothing was signaling to people that buy her music to also buy Fendi and vice versa. The big sale of it all, like a tennis ball thumping back and forth without ever going out of bounds or the players getting tired. When we breathed through our last cobra pose and went up for the downward dog, I saw myself echoed to infinity in the corner mirrors,where they faced each other. The sweat magnified the images, and I thought to myself at the time hall of mirrors.
I read a bit of Zizek and the coldness of Hume and soft Kierkegaard. Nothing deep. I'm too emotional for philosophy, like I said. I try but I get derailed at the first wave of feeling. Most of it I can't even follow, so much have I developed a pragmatic, unimaginative streak.
All I really wanted to say with this letter was that I am a 40-year-old university almni who hated school because I felt constantly like they were simply trying to get me to think in a certain way. And if you wouldn't kowtow, then bye-bye. Sure, in those days, you might still attend, but that loneliness? that lack of membership? That's real.
And it doesn't feel good.
Now I have a couple of ins, but that feeling like I don't belong is just something I live with. It's like a piece of my promontory was broken off and the land is a little muddy there, prone to erosion when storms come. I'm a wife and a mother--"in" right? It's the best so far. I am there, it's only me there. It's even starting to feel safe. But the trick alongside family life is that you have to continue to esteem each individual member in order to relish and acknowledge the value of your membership. It's esteem, great respect for the freedom of will and humanity of others, that keep the value of your role fresh and alive. When that erodes, for days or moments, it turns cold like every other scenario, and you have to work hard to restore color.
My other "in" is that I am an Orthodox Christian. We are members of the Greek Orthodox Church of America, but we are thoroughly American. It's sort of like if we stole across a river with our children at night and lived to tell about it, finding the area strange and foreign, and a greatly welcoming site. We don't speak the language, we have no supplies. But our new country of Christians has welcomed us with literal open arms, and we suffer being different very mildly.
Some of our parish are up in arms about Texas and publicly declaring the unfairness of the new abortion laws to underrepresented groups, like African-Americans and Mexicans.
From others I have heard that abortion is cruelest to black and Hispanic communities because it is part of a grander white Nazi-era scheme to destroy brown-skinned people.
I don't know. On the Lanai of the University of Hawaii, I had two separate friends (both white) shed tears telling me the incredibly difficult circumstances that had caused them to abort. I want to cry now thinking of their pain. At one point I myself downed a lethal-to-a-fetus dose of Plan B or whatever we had at the time. It was an overdose of birth control that I got from a generous fellow student late at night in the mall parking lot. She had given me her phone number, told me to call if I needed to. And showed up for me. I never even thought twice about it. I don't think I was ever pregnant to begin with, but I might have been.
Anyway. My whole point here is not about abortion, though that seems to be where my mind and curiosity go when I consider the social justice movement. My note was about how being a Christian means you belong, but with all the losers. So you're in with the outcasts. Which to be quite honest is the most ok thing with me. I don't know much but I know I feel empty inside when I try to impress people. I'd honestly rather be with my dad who has a terrible temper but has never lied to me, or this girl Stephanie who once hollered out the car sincerely at a hooker to compliment her hairstyle. Or Tom, who hums and rocks back and forth in a way that is both comforting and mysterious, drawing out my mothering instincts and my desire to prove myself safe enough for him to stay around. I could go on and on. You get my point.
I idolize many things, I am sometimes I dreamer, and tempted very frequently to despair. One thing I don't do much of is joining the fray. Perhaps I am in the glass coffin of Snow White, primly waiting for things to return to a normal that has never existed. Or maybe I am here to hold on to whatever little land the roots of my promontory can keep against such a salty sea of self-righteousness. I had a Titter handle at one point but couldn't for the screaming.
More than agreeing or disagreeing, I just want to ask the general public, the reader—when did 'issues' drive every relationship, and when did they become as simple as the level at which we as a society think of them?
Maybe we can fix it, but I am skeptical of the current theory of how.
I don't know anything. It's hard being here on earth, as it has almost always been.
So for everything that I read, and everything I missed, I just wanted to say, thank you for what you said. And thanks for saying it out loud.
