Death of The Myth

What’s happening in the US these days is the breakdown of the body of American myths– about where we came from, how we made our lives here, what we did and didn’t do to form this nation. Truth finally is being revealed and acknowledged.

Some have always known these truths, but most of America, brought up on myths and lies that made us look better than we ever were, were nested comfortably in the school-taught beliefs that we were the Good Guys, the Nice Guys.

This process of dissolution of the myths embedded in our belief-systems and minds is the first step to real and positive change. It is true for an individual, it is true for a community: Reality has to be recognized, has to be accepted for a person or a community to actually see the need for change and to inspire the will to change.

This season of challenges, from dealing with an administration that lies and manipulates beyond anything we’ve ever seen in this country, to pandemic, to the war against people of color by white supremacists breaking out of the shadows… We are finally coming to understand in greater and greater numbers that a nation built on myths is unsustainable: Reality is that which, when it’s ignored, does not go away. Reality is the iceberg in the path of the Titanic, it is the coal fire in the hold that no one knows about. We have been working without enough information, with mistaken beliefs, taking those stories we learned in school to be all we needed to know.

Reality is staring us down, forcing us to face the deep roots of how and why we came to where we are today.

I believe in America. I believe in the essential good will of normal Americans. I believe that intelligence and compassion and an innate sense of justice is stronger in most of us, than the need to find false comfort within the lies. Our sense of getting right with nature and each other and the divine, whatever we conceive that to be, is stronger than our fears.

We–the everyday Americans–have been tolerating the stresses and strains of trying to shape Reality to our fantasies, and we are waking to how life, our communities, our nation can be, if only we stop tolerating and own our power to create the world we actually want. We have reached the limits of tolerance of injustice because finally, we are understanding that what happens to others is also happening to us. What our community loses when some of its people are not given justice diminishes all of us.

The Powers That Be are finding that lies can only support illusory power. The High and Mighty are having to remember whose labor holds them up at the top of the pyramid.

This, of course, is not just true of the United States. It is true of every nation led by dictators who want to be gods, creating myths of reality for everyone within their grasp. There are too many of those in the world today.

The Cleansing Storm

 Change comes slowly, sometimes takes a couple of generations for a society to let go of an old and obsolete tradition. It takes time to get it that what was once a solution has become a problem. The stream of time flows placidly because we like it that way, undisturbed and undisturbing.

But sometimes a storm comes and stirs the waters, and floods the banks, and it is an opportunity for the old and settled to be stirred up and cleared of muck. For a while, the water runs clearer and only the weightiest of stones and the most deeply rooted plants remain.

We’re in the storm now, and some real things are clearer than ever, and the need for working with what’s real becomes not just necessary, but possible.

The Third Wish

I woke this morning from a dream in which I had been granted three wishes. 

The first was not too hard to come up with: perfect health! No more neuropathy, no more gout, no more weird-sightedness, no more diabetes! A body full of wellness, all the energy to go and do and dance!  And perfectly-balanced brain chemistry, too, so no more depression, no more dysthymic never-quite-happiness! Of course  there is also the ‘time to enjoy it’ codicil: I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t want to die as a means of escaping ill-health, either.  Yep, the first one was easy, though I am still working on the wording of it. 

The second wish… That would be my super-power wish. Once upon a time, it would be the ability to fly. Now, though, I would go for the ability to understand and speak all languages. Not just human languages–all means of communication used by birds and whales and elephants and… everything. For flying, with that perfectly healthy body, I could always get a jet-pack or something. 

The third wish…  I spent the rest of the dream trying to decide what that would be. Perpetual financial security? Or something about being welcomed, being liked and appreciated, being cherished…  But I wanted it to be something for or about other people. Then I thought about wishing for the ability to diminish fear.  But none of this could be wishing to infringe anyone else’s free will or free thinking or feeling. It could not be about taking away the karmic lessons someone else is here to learn from. Perhaps it should be the ability to give someone exactly the energies they need to deal with their own stuff. Actually, that sounds pretty good. Yes, I might go with that.

The problem with the three-wishes thing is that djinns and faeries and their ilk who offer such gifts–Well, they are tricksy! You have to ask very, very carefully to get what you want, because if you aren’t careful, those little agents of chaos will twist your request into something you really, really didn’t mean to ask for!  But your asking left the door a-jar…

So, what would your three wishes be? And how would you word them?

It has never been about “race.”

It doesn’t take a degree in anthropology–which I have–nor a lifelong love of words and the precision of words, which I also have–to make the case that we are all ONE RACE, that there are not multiple races of mankind.

The word is used because it has always been used, but it has always been the wrong word.

The right word isn’t race, it is culture.

It may seem the wrong time to bring this up, to insist on a lesson in language and civics. But this is what makes it especially relevant and important now:

If we call it race then it is a thing based in genetics, in nature over which we have little control, and which by some would be laid at the door of God.

If we call it culture then it derives from purely human origins. And that means we have infinitely more power over it. We don’t have to change nature, or challenge the Divine, we only have to dig in and question our own beliefs and assumptions, our own habitual attitudes and their antecedents.

It’s work… but it’s easier than changing biology.

CALIFORNIA SUMMER

I lived three summers, age3 to nearly 6, in northern California. This is how I remember it.

Summer heat–
sweet relief
in darkened hall
beneath the fan,
the rumbling wind,
the storm
that blew the cool
all through the house…
I’d catch a chill and die,
they claimed.
Disbelieving,
driven out to play,
I’d wait
another chance…

Summer feet–
freed from socks and keds
not always
sufficiently aware
of bees among the clovers
growing green in golden lawn…
Dancing barefoot over
dark macadam streets
all afternoon
but in the dusk
relishing
warm sidewalks
before I had to go to bed
the sky still blue…

Summer treat–
popsicles sweet and cold,
bright and sticky–
one stick or two
if pleading good behavior
won the prize
and we didn’t have to share…
Eagerly
we waited
dimes in hand,
for merry music dancing
on the summer evening air…

copyright 2006 by CLRedding

LONG ISLAND SUMMERS

When I was nearly 6, I was sent across the country to live on the outskirts of New York City. That was where I lived the next 12 summers, in Glen Cove, Long Island and then in northeastern New Jersey.

I’d go back
for just a moment,
perhaps as long
as one day and a night,
enough, I think,
to relish what I loved
about Long Island summers:

Scents of ragweed,
seared grasses,
almost-too-sweet roses
in the heavy summer air…

Glittering waters,
hot, hot sand
and tiny shells
hiding in the drying
seaweed margin of the tide…

Early mornings
sun like a glowing peach
soft-lit hazy cool
’til nearly 10…

And thunderstorms
some afternoons
that bruise the air
and break the back
of humid heat’s oppression…

Cicada-noisy nights,
lit here and there
by sudden
silent sparks
of spectral yellow, green
and random
like imaginings
or magic,
to be captured
briefly
in a jar…

It’s the fireflies I miss the most…

copyright July 2006 by CLRedding

Remembering the 60s

I was beginning to pay attention to the world outside my own life in the 60s, a time of gentle sprouting flowers inviting peace and simple happiness, even as Vietnam body-counts traumatized the country daily. There was the enthusiasm for new freedoms and the abuses of those freedoms; the flowers were tainted with drugs, and free love was both blessing and curse. Shifting gender roles confused and frustrated. Authority took on sinister shadows, and we learned to trust warily if at all, because that’s what happens when you discover someone you relied on has been lying to you all along… Values and rules, likewise.

Where our parents had respected government, had lived comfortably within the established social rules, and had focused on their personal fulfillment of the American Dream, we were digging down and exposing the corresponding American Nightmare that had always lurked below. Virtue was no longer all about financial stability and model families, but about a dire honesty with ourselves regarding the world we inhabited. 

The 60s were an era of challenging every status quo, of protesting what we saw as systemic injustice and toxic traditions. No one was allowed to be comfortable with how things had been. Integrity flipped from being properly socially conventional to being willing to confront every unfairness we detected, to put our energies into fixing all we saw was wrong. It was an exhausting time. It was terrifying, to those who had no wish to change their own habits of thinking and living. It overtook everyone like an inexorable tidal bore, bringing change to us all, ready or not.

Some of us retreated from the chaos, the confusion, the challenging of every one of the values we’d been raised with.  Some of us embraced it, got involved with trying to protect it, save it, change it.

Some of us turned our backs, went off the conventional social grid, and took refuge in living simpler pioneer lives, self-sufficient as we could be, and often stoned. Life was about confrontation with Nature which proved to be neither loving nor forgiving, but indifferent and relentless. There is a maturing effect in disillusionment: Many abandoned the felicitous dream and rejoined the conventionally turbulent society while the sweet naivete of the Flower Children did as gardens do, growing through their spring and summer, going to seed in the fall. 

The term “Hippy” devolved into a sneer among the next generations of kids who never knew when Hippies were the model of sincerity, honesty and self-reliance. They only ever saw the bedraggled winter garden. 

This is how I remember the 60s. As the narrator in the film, RADIO FLYER, says at the end, “This may not be how it was. But it is how I remember it.”

Familiarity Breeds Compassion

The basic problem with passive racism is that we who live in the gated zone of white privilege simply don’t know enough about black lives, black families, black cultures. We, like most descendents of colonial conquerors, never inherited the genes for sincere curiosity nor for respect for The Other. We accepted so many core beliefs from our own antecedants.

Only we mattered. Only we were quite wholly human. We represented the apex of civilization, the height of God’s Plan for mankind. Our beliefs were the truest, our understandings the wisest, our interpretations of philosophies and religious the most and only correct ones.

Years ago, there was a mini-series based on author Alex Haley’s search for his African heritage. ROOTS was a huge eye-opener. A heart-opener. It showed us–the dominant culture in America who never had to look before–black people as… people. People with feelings and dreams, with families. We saw them in pain and fear, in love, in anger and desperation. We saw them brutalized. We saw them well-treated. We saw them talented and strong and wise. By the end of the series, at least some of us no longer saw black people as merely mono-dimensional, stereotypical Others. We had seen that they were, in fact, a lot like Us.

We need more than our fears and assumptions and lies we’ve been taught, to get it, that we are all people trying to live our lives. That it hurts to have people regard you with fear, or condemnation, or disdain. That we all love our children and just want to give them happiness and a good and thriving future in a troublesome world. That it is not unreasonable to expect to be treated with courtesy and respect.

And while we’re here… It has never ever been about race. We are all one race. It has always been about cultural differences. Cultural. Which means, it isn’t genetic, it is and has always been human-generated beliefs and attitudes. And that means, it’s stuff we can fix.

Because how we regard ourselves and others has always been a matter of choice.

Line of Succession

Every one of us alive today is the front end of a line of survival and evolution that began with the first life on the planet.

Every one of us represents all our ancestors, all the way back to the beginning. We stand on their shoulders, increasing knowledge and understanding; we limit ourselves by clinging to their no-longer viable, and outright mistaken beliefs and habits. That’s something to think about, when we consider throwing in the towel, giving up, going under: That is the line we are finishing, when we bequeath an uninhabitable world to our children.

Each of us is like the meteor that streaks across the sky, ending an existence that goes back to the beginning of the Universe. Every body began and will end as star dust.

How Did We Get Here?

In those days just after WWII,  the young adults had come out of war, and their parents, the Great Depression. People remembered how it was to lack and to need and to wait. Kids of the 50s, we had Viet Nam and national division and deep suspicion of our government. But we had licence like never in living history, too, with The Pill making ‘safe sex’ possible, and relaxation on stigmatized traditions, like divorce and therapy and abortion. There was money flowing. We were patriotic, we were eager to learn, especially in the sciences once Sputnik started the race to own Space. 

Then there was the whole cult of Taking Care of Number One, that glorified selfishness, even as it denied the tradition of toxic self-sacrifice for the needs of others. But not all self-sacrifice is toxic.

Decade by decade, we have come to this place of low tolerance for boredom, for not getting what we want, when we want it. We have traded low attention span for the constant stream of news and nonsense online, and no ability to wait, to be still, to be alone with our thoughts. We are so multi-task-minded, we have anxiety over doing only one thing at a time, and there is precious little mindfulness in any given day, or hour. We lost along the way, the love of knowing things, in favor of the freedom to express any damn opinion about any damn thing without having to have done the work of learning, of knowing what we’re talking about. 

We are seeing the true cost of these changes now, in a time of uncontrollable and supremely toxic government, in a time of life-threatening attack by internal terrorism and external disease. And so many of us have lost the skills needed in crisis. 

The most serious question of our world today, is whether we can rise above our habits of laziness, of weakness, or our so-many inabilities, to pull ourselves out of this morass. Those who can, maybe, will survive to make substantive changes in the self-destroying ways we have been doing things. Those who get it together will dig in and learn the science to combat or even just deal with things we can’t babble and opine our way out of, like pandemic, like climate change, like political systems that are immoral, unethical, insane and destructive. We will identify and acquire the skills of living in the changed world.

Every society has had times like these. Some blew up or imploded, some embraced change and evolved. Every society has had its madmen at the top, wreaking havoc as long as they held power. Every society has had its dysfunctional beliefs and habits. Probably every one of them were sure that they were living through the End Times, that they were struggling against powers capable of destroying the world. 

We can’t destroy the planet, but we can destroy our place on it. We can take a lot of others with us in our bid for self-destruction. But there have been mass extinctions before, and catastrophic events that changed everything. We just weren’t there, then, to be caught up in it, to see it coming–and just maybe to do something about it before we are ended by refusing to take responsibility for it.