Let's Handle This and Keep Getting it Done

As a response to feeling like I was played in the national political arena (not alone in that, but I still take it personally) I tasked myself with learning more history and more social awareness. This is not the easiest road I have traveled recently. It's making me feel more like a chump, initially, reminding me often how I have chosen to live in a pleasant bubble characterized by some self-righteousness, some faith in my core values that may not fit the times, and my own addiction to escapism.

Yes, I'm being really hard on myself lately. This weather is isolating and reinforcing my chosen mode of solitude, so I'm kind of happy in here, but the knowledge I am gaining is brutal. I want to be shaken to my core, to have to rebuild some sense of peace with it, and to emerge stronger, but I can see that this is going to be a long process and is going to make me work a lot harder than I want to. I hope I stick with it.

The facts of the slave-breeding industry that built the wealth of the white man is devastating. (I'm reading The American Slave Coast.) It galls me that we can so easily dismiss this, as white people, as something of the past that we fixed. It is not fixed. Reading Between the World and Me got through to me the point that a person's body, the one most vital thing, can be profoundly not their own. At first I was comparing this to being a woman...yeah, me too, men think they can own me...and now I see this as a pale defensive reaction to the reality of the level of brutality that was used. Sure, it's sometimes difficult to be a woman, and being the easy victim of a violent crime is a very sobering reality, but I also get all those layers of condescending protection and reverence that although thin and a lie, do grant me some avenues for building my life that people of color certainly do not get. I'm also reading Lies My Teacher Told Me to understand the framing that led me to this bubble and right to the edge of knowledge, but not into it.

It's emotional content that weighs so heavily on me I find it staggering that I could have gotten to the age of 65 without really getting a grasp of it. I'm shocked at my own compliance at building my bubble. I am someone who reads! I am someone who does think about things! Yet, I am someone who has been part of the problem much more than part of the solution. And I expect to continue in that, for my lame reasons and pale, flimsy excuses.

I think as an old white lady I do need to beat myself up a little about this stuff, stopping short of completely demoralizing myself, but really driving home the message that this IS MY PROBLEM. This world situation, this political chaos, this economic injustice, this sexism, this racism, these leaders, these citizens, are ME. It seems I have constructed so many excuses for not only my own selfishness, but that of everyone else. I blame the system. I blame the stupid people, I blame the fake news people, I blame the ones who tune out and don't work for progress, I blame the complexity of the problems, and it all amounts to me letting myself off the hook.

I guess this is how we survive emotionally, compliant like slaves, though that is an insensitive comparison. Most of the statements I can come up with at this stage are insulting and insensitive, and I'm not asking for forgiveness. I'm not wanting anyone else to let me off the hook, or enable me, or try to convince me that I have been doing the best that I can under the circumstances. I have not. I have been compliant as I was trained to be, and learned to be, as the easiest way out. I have wasted many of my resources.

We use our resources for entertainment...we take rich celebrities as heroes and project all kinds of holiness on them, and we spend hours studying them as they play these fictional roles. We grieve for them when they die as if we actually were friends with them...we put them in the place of our friends, who can't measure up to that kind of grace and wisdom, which we tend to forget is a projection on a silver screen. We take the glitter for granted and forget that it is massively wasted resources that people need desperately. We allow entertainment to be our drug of choice and we use it with passionate religiosity. And those of us who like to travel often use it the same way. 

We "do" Paris, or rafting the Yangtze or wherever. We frame it as personal growth (valid), as collecting experiences instead of things (also valid, if you believe that we are also not addicted to things), as any kind of rationalization structure we please. We aspire to it. We, as a culture, are bankrupt.

So to me, this election of the prime bankrupter, the agent of chaos, who happens to be a gilded celebrity, is a cynical manipulation decades in the making, and should not surprise us in the least. We had Reagan and  Bush, also not diplomats, not inspiring public servants, but simply smooth-looking managed celebrities we wanted to bring into our homes and families. Many of us cynical survivors of the 70's revolutions did see through this, but we didn't really take the opportunity to frame it as a long-range game that we would ride to here. Our attraction to drama was fed and we worked around it, still trying to keep to our progressive values of making a better world for everyone. We did some good. We dropped the ball often and we had our excuses.

I wasn't planning to watch the PBS show the other night about Boomers, as I dislike being put in a group of mountain beavers and don't always agree with the generational assessments, but I did end up agreeing with some of it and though I missed the beginning I got the gist. The point seemed to be that our core values were formed by what our parents brought back from World Wars, where they worked together in deathly conditions to find a sense of foxhole equality. Something shifted there to give a framework for us all working together for shared goals and that stuck with most of us as we moved into our lives. All of the liberation movements of the 70's, as they were developed and refined, gave us a solidarity that other generations didn't get in quite the same way. What I found most interesting is that of course, like all bubble qualities, the result of this is that we are surprised and shocked when other people do not share our values. We were sure everyone did, because we had thoroughly proven the truth and justice of them. Thoroughly! 

And to a certain extent that was true, but we raised our families and perhaps failed to transmit some of those, as I know I failed, and gradually we made our compromises and fought for our individual gains and as things grew more chaotic and desperate, we almost didn't notice the erosion of our values. "Common decency" is no longer a known quantity. Our kids do not necessarily agree with us on the way forward in this life, and I can't fault them completely...they live in a different world, where it is less safe, there are fewer good choices, and often the people with strong values are put in the position of being chumps. That was how Hillary supporters were portrayed and public perception is so much stronger than any other reality. We were spun. We're still reeling. That won't help us, though.

Kids who grew up with all the dramatic renderings of the apocalypse and future chaos expect that now. I think they kind of welcome it, as the gritty reality of work and death is not lit up and attractive unless you have the beaucoup bucks to consume in an upscale fashion, and they are simultaneously locked out of that. I don't buy the idea that it was parents building up their egos that caused it. My experience was that I desperately wanted to frame a positive model for my child as I didn't observe that he was seeing what I thought was true. He wasn't going to have access to the so-called and mythical American Dream. He was MIT material, but we didn't have the means and he didn't have the drive, and I didn't know how to make him want it. Plus I knew that many types of science-based positions were not going to be good for him...he could build robots for the military, he could work on tech gadgets for the intelligence industry, and so on. I couldn't work hard enough to create a scenario for him that would justify me allocating tons of borrowed money to set him up for a huge and devastating disappointment when his degree did not get him anything he wanted. It was a gamble that turned out to be some valid thinking...at least he wasn't caught up in the student debt crime, too much anyway. But it left him in a deficient position along with most of the rest of us. Which is why we blow the bubble and step so willingly into it.

I wanted him to be educated, but I probably transmitted too much cyncism. I tried to make him care about others, but I think that might have backfired when we had to hang out in my social service job at his school. He didn't see a lot of hope and change in there. I don't think he has ever really gotten caught up in political action, and I don't fault him for that. You have to be quite the idealist to dedicate your energies to that.

I, of course, am still that idealist, and I'll stop talking about my particular son because I am guessing he is a lot more committed to my values than I know, and is in the time of life when he gets to answer to his own values. And he is not bankrupt, and he does read, and he does think, so I know he will come to useful conclusions on his own throughout the course of his life. He was not ruined by me telling him he had everything he needed to succeed. He, as a tall, good-looking white male, with intelligence, has all the right stuff to do anything he wants. I'm speaking of him more as an example of "our kids," basically anyone younger than myself with a similar genetic makeup.

What life offers him (them) at this point, is mostly surface glitter and the pursuit of more money in a never-ending struggle that isn't winnable. When I see kids of his generation spinning their wheels I do not think it is their fault or my fault, or their own parents or their wives or friends. They got the same raw deal all of the common people have always gotten, with the varying degrees of horribleness that get portioned out according to the luck of birth. He got a bigger pile of cards, and if he wants to play them in particular ways, he can get some wealth and power, or at least the means to fuel his addictions to entertainment and experience-collecting. He can be a man of his time. Or he can have principles and probably be a poor person with high ideals, which is not really a terrible choice, all things considered.

But to me today, being a man of your time is not something to be proud of but a trap that is code for being willing to adopt whatever bankrupt values are offered, as it is not a coincidence that this is the term used for people who used to breed human beings to use their bodies to build wealth at negligible cost. I don't really want him to be a man of his time. I hope instead he has found some models for building a life that is meaningful to him and others, that satisfies his basic needs with some surplus to share, and a life that will make the world a better place, somehow, at some times, in some really true and just way.

That's my boomer-value-system speaking. I can't provide a huge amount of help to him to get there, or even to help him want to get there. I can't assume that is what he wants. I have suicide in my family, and mental illness, so maybe all I can want is for him not to have that in my family in the future. Maybe all I can want is some simpler kind of emotional survival that feeds some of his needs. Maybe all I can want is to get to see him once in a while and get along fairly well for those hours. It's not something I can control.

So leaving the younger generation to their collective fate, what can I do? I can read books forever, as there will not be an end to my self-education, and I hope I can move through the beating-myself-up stage to a more hopeful stance. I can use that education to spread what really is truth, and not buy into this post-truth bullshit. I can stand with the many people of my generation who do hold my values, and know that dedicating ourselves to the betterment of all people really is a worthwhile and real goal, for real truth and  justice. We will have to work together to construct a better story about the American Way, as that is truly bankrupt and we should stop pretending it isn't. We all know that a huge part of the group who don't vote simply refuse to use that compromised method for working forward. We hope they do it in other ways. We hope that putting chaos in power will be a way to defeat it and restore some better type of order...that may be our calling at this point. We may be able to communicate and restore our values to those who want values, are desperately asking for values. Suicide, which now takes the form of murder first, is a message of the desperate wish for something better, without the means to articulate it. We can continue and increase our efforts to communicate what a better world will be built with. We can bring out our tools and use them in modelling the way we want the world to go.

So I have to agree with people who are saying we should ignore the Twittering, stop finding so much pleasure in the drama and humor of it, and hold ourselves accountable for really doing our best. We can continue our work or start it, begin to think about our values or step up the way we live them. We can all make one better choice, one at a time. It will matter. It does matter. The zombies aren't here yet, and the bubble can stretch to be a bit healthier and more inclusive. Step by step, little by little. Start anywhere. Do what you can with what you have. What you do will help you and help the world. 

And if it doesn't, well, like I said, reality is grim and gritty and then you die. Whatever. Meh. I'm going to get high and enjoy this beautiful if inconvenient snowy Saturday. Fuck it. But I will pick those books back up later and keep working. One thing I am sure I did transmit is that nothing matters more than hard work. If you can handle it.