First of all -- regarding
the chat -- we'll never have a day/time when we can all do it. :( Since we have a couple RSVPs for Thursday night, let's plan on it. We can finalize the time tomorrow maybe. Speak up if you think you might come and have any thoughts on the time.
It seems like we have several active topics in the Moon Garden right now, and I suspect they are all inter-related and part of the same thing. But for right now I wanted to try to respond to
annala's great post about history and cultural change. History is my passion and actually the way I understand the world, and your post really resonated with me.
I was born in '65 and so my coming of age years were during the Reagan era. It was interesting what you wrote about your friends who were black, the conflicts that arose, and the influence of your parents. I didn't think much about it until recent years, but my two best friends in school were gay boys. Neither of them were "out" of course -- that would have been suicide -- and one was not out even to himself. He had a very hard time because his family was extremely homophobic; he had something of a crackup after he met another boy and realized the truth about himself.
My other friend was able to be more honest with himself from the beginning because he had supportive parents who loved him and accepted the way he was. He got a very hard time in school because he liked to do things like wear ascots and decorate his school books with pictures of Faye Dunaway. He seemed the gentler of my two friends at the time but now I realize he was the stronger-minded one, because he had this core of love from his parents.
I eventually lost touch with both after our school days but from what I understand they are both now doing well, out, open, happy, with partners.
My parents were not practicing liberals,
annala, but something else very important that has always influenced me -- people deeply committed to the principle of live and let live. They were very adamant that other people had the right to live their lives as they saw fit. I can't remember a time when they ever expressed any idea of feeling threatened by minorities or gays.
They were very supportive of our right to listen to the music we liked and read what we liked. My older sister loved David Bowie and was totally into Quentin Crisp and other aspects of gay culture, among other wide-ranging interests. This was just accepted at our house as part of the world. In many ways my life was and has been very conventional, but I realize now that I was very lucky to be encouraged to develop a free mind. At the time I just assumed everyone's family was this way.
annala, your post reminded me very much of the Biblical story about "the handwriting on the wall." In the Book of Daniel, the King of Babylon is having a great feast, praising false gods, when a strange invisible hand appears and writes something that appears to be gibberish. Daniel, one of the Hebrews in the court, provided a translation for the worried king, but it wasn't a very reassuring one: Your days are numbered.
The world is changing beyond recognition from the one I grew up in -- essentially the world built by my parent's generation and
annala's. The challenges are immense. Once again, those who are constructive and future-oriented -- Adam to name just one -- are the outsiders. There is a reason we now speak of the "powers that be" instead of "leaders," because too many of the powers are not leaders at all, but shabby and small.
This is not a partisan message, it is much larger, it is about identity and purpose. What is
our job in the world -- whether we are American or European or Chinese or Japanese or gay or straight or whatever? What do
we have to teach and do? What is the special contribution only
we can make, and how do we prepare ourselves for it?
It seems to me that America's cultural energy and dynamism has come from the constant ferment of disenfranchised groups who remake the country every few generations with fresh creativity and ideas. Is not our challenge now to be as adventurous, as profound, as creative, and even as dangerous as we were within
annala's living memory?
Adam has come face to face with a extraordinary wall of pettiness and superficiality. It really astonishes me -- a music business divorced from actual music and musicians! But I don't see how greatness can be torn out of human nature. It seems to me that the communications revolution of the Internet is exposing the staleness and meanness that has sapped our institutions. When people can bypass the gatekeepers, surely those with messages of meaning and enlightenment will find like-minded souls?
The Heavens cease not their bounty: they send us generous hearts into every generation. And now what generous heart can pretend to itself, or be hoodwinked into believing, that Loyalty to the Moneybag is a noble Loyalty? -- Thomas Carlyle