Is it really hate?

I survived the Amendment 1 battle this spring. Many hurtful things were said during the months leading up to the day that 62% (I think) of my fellow citizens of North Carolina voted on my marriage with a resounding NO SAME SEX MARRIAGE ALLOWED! I remember coming home from working the polls that evening, and seeing the early results on tv. It was like getting hit in the gut; I just started crying.

I recently read an article in which an archbishop said that the proposed amendment in Minnesota, which is on the ballot this fall, isn't meant to hurt anybody. That struck me as a very strange thing to say, but I'll even give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he really means it kind of in the way a parent with a belt in his hand might say "this hurts me more than it hurts you." I don't agree, and in my opinion it is willfully delusional, but I expect his self-rationalization depends on believing that he's not intentionally hurting a large swath of the population.

I've been troubled through all of the rhetoric surrounding civil rights about the use of the word "hate". I do know that in the household where I grew up there were two phrases that were completely off limits: "I hate you" and "Shut up." Every family has its taboos, and those were ours. So I come from a lifetime of not using the word hate to describe my feelings for any person. Things, yes. I can hate my hair, a movie, a hideous chair, getting out of my warm bed on a cold morning. But people? No.

I was not born a Unitarian-Universalist, but when I first came into the fellowship and read the principles, they resonated with me. I could definitely "affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all people". That doesn't mean I love and want to hang out with all people everywhere, or that I agree with and have respect for everything everybody says. Not by any means. But the inherent worth and dignity of every infant born? That's a no-brainer.

If I truly hold that affirmation, it requires me to try to see things from another point of view. Who are the people who would commit atrocities against other people in the name of their religion? How can anyone beat a child to teach her how to behave? Why does the idea of black people voting freely, or gay people getting married cause such strong, and often violent, resistance?

I'm not very good at it, seeing it from their point of view. And I run the risk of inserting my own arrogance or judgments. But when I try to put myself into the shoes of the lady outside of Chick-fil-A with a handful of waffle fries and a mouth full of slogans, it most often feels like fear. Fear that the world is changing too fast. Fear of those people who seem so different. Fear that her own child could become one of those others. Maybe even fear that if she doesn't personally do something to stop it, she will be held accountable by her God and be condemned.

I really think that most people, unless they are clinically insane, justify their behavior, no matter how bizarre or unreasonable it might look to others. The embezzler is just borrowing the money and will pay it back before anybody misses it. The car thief needs this car more than that "rich" person who owns it. The student who cheats on the test didn't have time to study and needs this grade to graduate. We all rationalize and justify our behavior, usually in small, inconsequential ways. As the behavior moves up the destructive scale, the justifications become ever more unusual, but they're still there. Even terrorists who kill people have their own reasons and justifications.

Hate is a strong word. I don't think the lady outside of Chick-Fil-A hates me. She doesn't even know me. It is easier to hate an amorphous group or an idea than it is an individual person you interact with. Sometimes hate is the appropriate word and describes a very real feeling. But to refer to entire groups of people as HATERS seems counter-productive to me. It simply perpetuates the stereotypes and generalizations that give rise to violence in the first place.

Maybe we can celebrate the International Day of Peace by not calling people haters.

The Good Ol' Days

Jill has very clear rules about food. She'll eat something for supper, she'll take the leftover for lunch the next day, and then it becomes poisonous. No ambivalence. No shilly-shallying. Straightforward, no need for judgment calls or decision making. Moving right along. For me, it's not so simple.

It might be because of our half-generation gap. It shows up now and again, highlighting the ten year difference in our ages. I was raised by actual Great Depression parents, the kind that don't throw anything away if there's still some use left in it. The kind who used to say, "But you just got a new coat two years ago. Why do you want another one?" In that household, throwing away food was a sin just short of grand larceny.

For ten years now, Jill and I have had these related discussions:

me - "What happened to those mashed potatoes from the other day?"
her - "I threw them away."
me - "But I was going to make potato patties tonight!"
(She smiles with secret satisfaction, knowing she just saved herself from eating poisonous potatoes.)

me - "Are we out of sweet pickles?"
her - "I threw them away."
me - "What? Pickles don't go bad. That's why they're pickles, to preserve them."
her (shrugging) - "They were past the date."
me - "Don't you know that's just a marketing ploy? Why, Aunty Ann made pickles and we used to get them      from the basement for years."
(Same smirk.)

or this one:

her - "Is this milk still good? The date is ok, but...."
me - "Of course it is. That's the sell-by date, not the expiration date."
her - "But it smells funny."
me - (taking a swig) "Nah, it's fine."
(She wrinkles her nose and puts it back in the fridge, never to touch it again.)

Just like everything else we've encountered, this took awhile to iron out, and I think what we have today is an uneasy truce. I still have covered dishes of leftover dabs of things I think I might eat for lunch while she's not home, and she ignores them. I've come to accept that she will ALWAYS open the new jug of milk or juice, even if the other one is still not empty, and she will use the new one while I use up the old one. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.

I've been thinking about this, among other things, because I read an opinion piece online this morning about nostalgia as a political issue. It was this pundit's opinion that each of the major parties is suffering from Nostalgia ---- wanting to go back to the Good Ol' Days ----- but each focused on different parts of those ephemeral days. Now, I don't know if it's a function of age, or simply part of the human psyche, but I can relate to some of that pining for simpler times, even if I know that it's based on very selective memory.

Change is not an easy thing to embrace, a lot of the time. Of course, you don't hear anybody complaining about some changes. There might be a few, but the vast majority of people don't want to go back to having no electricity, no running water, no transportation except shoeleather or horses. (Keep in mind that there are still innumerable people for whom that is present-day life.)

So really, I think it's more the feelings than the actual reality that people long for. And that probably IS an indelible part of the human psyche. It is the warmth, security, and safety of early childhood that we long for. We don't want to be children again ---- Heaven Forbid! No autonomy, no adult beverages, no love life? Hell no! That's not what the advertisers and politicians are trading on when they evoke Mom and Pop businesses, families around the dinner table, Main Street, school and church, Little League and flag-waving. Oh, and don't forget apple pie. They're calling out our babyhood feelings, but placing them in grown-up situations. We'll get rid of the bad people, don't you worry. We'll make sure you're safe and secure and put a   chicken in every (deserving) pot. Vote for us.

I suppose there are folks who long to recreate the world they think they remember, where you didn't lock your doors and everybody knew your name. But that was never a universal experience, and even for those who lived it, the entire facade was dependent on other people NOT being able to live that way. There were no openly gay couples raising children on Main Street. In that America, the grunt work was done by the socially, if not legally, segregated non-white people who were never going to live in the big houses on Main Street or own the banks on Wall Street.

I expect it was pretty sweet to be able to simply ignore the unpleasant realities that were right under your nose, if you were white and male and middle class and at least moderately educated. The world WAS safe and ordered and predictable. But there's not a lot to be nostalgic about if you weren't.

When she was a kid, my daughter used to refer to historic times as "back when men ruled the world".  She grew up to be an historian.

These are the "good times" for kids being born in this decade. While the adults and all us old geezers are freaking out about how awful things are, they're just opening their eyes and discovering that the sun comes up and goes down every day, that seasons follow one another, that a hug is warm and sometimes things hurt, but the hurt stops after while. They won't all grow up feeling safe and secure --- that's never happened since the beginning of time ---- but enough of them will, that in 50 or 60 years, the Teens and Twenties will be soft-lens sweet, and folks will be saying "Wouldn't it be great if we could just go back to the Good Ol' Days?"

Quarter of a Century

25 years ago, we trooped into Wake Forest on Labor Day, looking for hope and change. Two vehicles, loaded with everything we owned after the marathon yard sales in Illinois, it was my husband Skip pulling the U-Haul trailer, the two kids 12 and 4, and me at the ripe old age of 37. My father drove his broken down little pickup truck, loaded to the gills with our stuff. We looked like leftovers from a John Steinbeck novel.

I've lived within 20 miles of that first rented townhouse ever since. Twenty-five years.

You have to realize that until this time, I never lived anywhere very long. My first big move was from Cedar Falls, Iowa where I was born, to Evanston, Illinois at the age of six weeks. That set the stage for me to move 32 times in my first 30 years. I not only never put down roots, I barely broke the surface. So staying here in the Triangle and only changing domiciles 4 times in a quarter century is pretty amazing to me.

Yesterday, I accidentally took a trip down memory lane. It was not my intention. I had to be up that way to drop Mom off at Barb's house, and she suggested that there might be a new coffee shop on White Street in Wake Forest, so I swerved through town just to see. No coffee shop, but something about the gloomy day and the actual anniversary made me cruise through the streets looking for my old self. So much has changed. I left Wake Forest nearly ten years ago and it has been following valiantly in Cary's footsteps ever since. When we moved there in 1987, there were 4500 people, two places to eat (The Fountain and Shorty's), one take out pizza place (PTA) and plenty of churches. The churches have burgeoned, as have the eating establishments. It's a veritable emporium of big box stores and slick-looking shops these days, and thousands more people with cars.

The two houses where I lived are still there, though one, a sorry-looking shack on a main road, has a For Sale sign in front of it. I expected it to be torn down after I moved out, but he's squeezed another decade of low rent and no maintenance out of it.

Twenty-five years is a pretty long time, though it doesn't seem so as I look back over it. I moved there younger than my older child is now. That's a little startling.When Dad helped us load up and move, he was the age I am now. That's even weirder. The generations are collapsing.

1987. Did the world feel as breathlessly precarious as it does today? Probably. Were the politics as venomous, the citizens so divided, the way so uncertain? When I sift back through the decades, even the tumultuous years of my youth at the height of the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights Movement, those are not the things that spring immediately to mind. Andrew was born shortly after the long, hot summer when Nixon resigned, but what I remember was living in that trailer, being way too hot, building projects for one of my classes, spending time with our best friends Michael and Cristi.

I marched in the war protests, I met with my women's collective, I agitated for legalizing abortion. I worked on local and gubernatorial campaigns in the seventies. I was passionate about the rights of women, improving the lot of children and public education. But those are not the things I remember now when I look back from my perch so many years later.

When I look back it's family I remember: my children being born, being toddlers and school kids. I remember the excitement when my parents would fly in from Europe during the summer and we'd get to spend time together. Vivid are the trips to Albia to see my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I think about starting my business on a $100 loan from Mom, and then keeping it going for almost 15 years. I remember friends and love and tears and divorce and love again. I don't remember politics.

I'm glad I've lived here in the South for twenty-five years. It was like a foreign country when I first moved here; I couldn't even understand what people were saying in the AA meetings in Wake Forest and Youngsville. But it gradually became home and if I spend the next twenty-five years living here, in this town, in this house even, that will be ok with me. The public life rages on and on, and always will. I'll pay attention and I'll sometimes get involved. But my real life, my true north, lies here in the dogwood trees and gentle cadences of the south, with my home, my wife and my family.