My son is leaving middle school and is headed for high school next year. His school had a “Progression Ceremony” for the departing eighth graders. It’s not a graduation, but it is a serious milestone. A summer evening, beautiful outside: Hundreds of parents and separately, hundreds of children, waited in the auditorium then listened to some short speeches by students and faculty over a terrible sound system. Awards were given for exceptional accomplishments, and then, grouped by teacher, the kids were called to the stage by name , one by one. Each group briefly stood together and was cheered and applauded. For a little over an hour.
Part way through the ceremony I realized how utterly profound and beautiful it was to recognize each and every student by name. To literally speak their name loudly announcing their accomplishment before the community. Recognizing them like: “You were here, you affected things, you were seen and appreciated. You persevered to success.” It’s a remarkable moment but even more than that moment for that individual, I was so moved by what really happened AROUND that moment.
In this America, struggling to cohere as a body of citizens, the school pulled a huge neighborhood of strangers with superficially gigantic differences, into one building and warmly reminded them of their fundamental relationship. The principal, staff and teachers reminded everyone of our shared enterprise; a great community, built out of healthy, well nurtured citizens. Nobody would say such a thing out loud of course, but the friendly smiles and chatting as we left reflected a renewed community warmth and openness. It was just one night in one neighborhood but it was important here, and it’s incredibly important that it happens almost everywhere in this country.
I’m so grateful for the public school system even with all my reservations about this and that. Yes it could use some new approaches to things, but the fact that it’s there, slogging through the absurd workload with the absurd budget, is a beautiful thing. It gets the job done as best it can with the sincerest effort I’ve ever seen.
The scam artists who want to sell out public schools for lucrative private contracts, wouldn’t care about the consequences anyway, but they would unstring critical connective tissue holding our country together. They would see the community as consumers and product, not as citizens charged with responsibility for the future.
All of us need a perfect, imperfect thing
that completes the circuits of a life worth living:
Someone too short, or intemperate,
Someone a little chubby, who never puts away her socks
Someone who doesn’t talk to us often enough
or a little too often
perhaps someone slightly crazy, drunk or bitter…
someone we weren’t expecting,
who makes weird noises while sleeping
and ties their shoes strangely.
But without them, our whole story would tilt, droop, linger pointlessly for a while, and collapse into the swamp.
The perfect thing is the thing we couldn’t live without
because of the way that it slipped through our defenses,
tamed us and became another word for Home before
we even knew what was happening.
The original meaning of the word outlaw was a person excluded from the benefit or protection of the law.
“Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people’s priorities change when there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them,'” says Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. “A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into ‘mobs’ that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality.” (MIT Parent Herald When good people do bad things. )
This is intuitively easy to grasp but we are so naive in regard to our apparent rationality that most of us don’t think we would caught up in the madness. The couple pictured here (below) are Jose Ismael Torres and Kayla Rae Norton. They terrorized a child’s birthday party with shotguns and confederate flags and vicious racist threats. The picture links to an article.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they are lovely people momentarily caught up in madness. I am saying they are kind of shitty people momentarily caught up in madness. She is a mother of two kids and her contrite sobs in court are not simply convenient, at least they don’t sound convenient to me. She’s lost everything; she’s lost her children, she’s done being happy. And at this moment in court she is honestly baffled at how things got so out of control.
She had a pre-existing condition as someone closely aligned with an “ethnic identity” group. She had a head full of terrible ideas years before this but the crucial vulnerability was her lifestyle of pack-bonding with this group and against the outsiders defined as such by the group. It’s easy to imagine she was nasty and insulting to random black Americans all her life but she was probably rather passive, giving the “stink eye”, muttering just above a whisper and such. The peaceable social norms of individual people in public places protected her from herself until she stepped outside of them with her pack to proudly show off the confederate flag only a little over a month after Dylan Root’s Charleston massacre of black church goers. Continue reading
I wanted to talk to you about girls.
But I can’t because you would react like I touched a lit match to your skin. If I kept talking, you’d react like I was holding your head under water.
So I thought I’d write to you about it a little. This way we can both pretend I never said a word.
Girls, women. Females.
Our relationship to them as men, as heterosexual men anyway, is so deep that it has no distance from who we are. Our relationship with women is a kind of hub for the rest of our lives. We look at them and we see what we hope for and dream of. Sometimes it’s only lust, a fiery urge: sometimes it’s romance, an irreplaceable heart connection to a one of a kind person. Sometimes it’s kind of about who you want to be in this life. Sometimes it’s clear water insight and sometimes it’s a fever dream.
Sexuality and attraction are like nitrogen in the air, they are basic, and forever. You won’t know life from here on without it. There is a longing in the soul to know and be close and there is a longing in almost all bodies to join their essence with a beautiful otherness to make new life, that is like you, and like her and yet new. Making babies is where our single note joins with another and makes a chord. The desire and the love is that chord. I’m unlikely to run out of metaphors talking about love and sex because it is the inspiration for variation and creation. Sex is voting with love for new life.
I don’t mean sex is only about reproduction. Numerically, sex is rarely about reproduction but at the same time, almost all sex is about the possibility of reproduction. It’s always possible and it’s often a silent discussion like “Us? Maybe? Ever? Soon?” Even though there are times that people are oblivious to those thoughts inside themselves, there is something fundamental and magnetic and deeper than ordinary relationship issues pulling us toward making new people.
But rather than drag on about the universal magic in the air, let me tell you some useful things. Continue reading
