Of Tribes and Diatribes

There’s just not enough time, you know?  So many things to do.  So much opportunity.  I get frozen – maybe dizzy, from turning around and around, trying to pick a direction for the next ten minutes.  Almost none of the things I’ve been choosing from have anything to do with cooking and cleaning (sadly), or anything else grown-up and responsible.

I had an interesting little experience yesterday and it put me in mind of our move to New York when I was in jr. high. (Yes, I’m getting talky.  I photographed the dickens out of winter two years ago and haven’t recovered my interest in it since.  So not many images to show-and-tell.   And I can’t knit unless something is happening around me – puppy charm does NOT count as “something happening”; I need stories coming in through eyes and ears before I can settle to do handwork; so no show-and-tell there either.  I can’t even get out there and kill myself with horses, since the world is either all ice or all mud.  And please see above note about cooking and cleaning (but who’d want to see images of that?).  I think I really want to write about my experience with home education, actually – how it went, what I learned.  But later.)

Anyway.  Once upon a time, our little TWA-employed family moved from the grain-fed Midwest to the worldly wise East and landed in Hartsdale, NY.  I finished jr. high in a building that was probably a hundred and fifty years old – beautiful, but shabby.  There were maybe three hundred kids in that school.  All East Coast, except for me, a Japanese exchange student, a girl from Washington state and one from Canada (with a hyphenated name).

I went through culture shock.  Everybody in this new place was Italian or middle European or Jewish or Puerto Rican (all exotic whites) or African American (what did those guys call themselves then? “Black,” I think, with a fist.)  Me?  I was blond (brown-eyed and brown eyebrows) and had spent most of my life in L.A.

Yeah.  I was an alien.  Which was no big deal.  I’d been alien before and lived.  And I made friends, both at church (nobody at church went to the same school as anybody else – we were from all over the place in the area) and at school.  But not, I have to tell you, at our school bus stop.

Every morning my little sister and I (tell me again why we rode the same bus???) walked down the road, around the corner and up a bit to sit on the stone wall in front of Delany’s house (not really Delany’s, but okay, it’s been a very long time) where we waited for the bus.

One of the girls at the stop was this spherical, narrow eyed, bleached blond mean girl with a tiny little turned up nose, last name: Schleria.  I have always suspected she was kind of her cousin’s lap dog, and all the stuff that happened happened so she could impress her popular-at-school cousin.  They purportedly lived in a mafia family enclave down the road from us, and who knows whether it was so?  Anyway, this girl was the “us” and my sister and I were the “them.”

The us people stood in a little group every morning, whispering together and looking over their shoulders at the them (just the two of us little girls in knee socks).  Exchanged amused glances.  Hands over mouth giggling and whispering.  Sometimes mean comments.  I had nightmares about that bus stop.  And started missing the bus on purpose.  Someday I’ll tell you how it ended.

The point is that I remember sitting on the bus one day – in the front row behind the driver; where else do you have any chance of safety?  And being angry.  Deeply, fiercely angry.  They don’t even know me, I was thinking.  Thinking it in words in my head, accompanied by moving pictures myself – a cat, a supple, aloof, muscle-rippling beautiful cat.  Then fireworks, bursting with what I was – imagination and loyalty and intelligence and goodness.  A good person.  A good friend.  Worth knowing. Powerful.  But they were so ready to write me off – without even discovering a molecule of all that.  I wanted to rise up and explode into fire and stars, right there in the front seat of the bus and just SHOW them.  Which is not the way it ended.

So anyway,  what happened yesterday was this: Gin posted a link on FB –

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs/index.html

And I went there, and I read the thing.  And I found it endearing.  I actually don’t read any of those blogs the girl was writing about—I find that kind of blog – and the writers of them –  a little intimidating.  And I’m not in that place – small kids and homemaking.  Plus, I was never one of those cool, popular girls who have it all going.

But what finally got me was the tenor of some of the comments left on the article.  I know, I know – never read the comments on a newspaper/magazine kind of thing.  People who comment on those things, safe in their anonymity, so often say the awfullest, ugliest, most horrifyingly unbridled and ignorant things.  But the article had caught me, and I found myself curious about people’s reaction to it.

See, you had this juxtaposition of the atheist feminist and the classic religious happy homemaker thing.  It was a very interesting bit of writing.

And some of the comments were also very interesting, very intelligent.  But a whole lot of them featured language I wouldn’t shovel on my rose beds (if I had any) – and a hatred that made me hold the computer at arms’ length while I scrambled to get to the next page.  What was disturbing was the nakedness of the emotional response.  Self defense with a buzz-saw.  As though the very suggestion of religion or domestic happiness was life-threatening to these people.

While I think it was religion in general that sent them up in flames, it was my own faith that was being attacked.  And the weird thing was, from the stuff these people were saying, it was glaringly obvious they didn’t know the first thing about us.  They knew rumors.  They knew the one or two sensational aspects of our history.  And there were a couple who identified themselves as “Mormon,” — but from the words they used (or misused) and the phrasing, I know they weren’t.  That they were lying.  Lying so they could damn a whole people and belief system.

Why would they do that?  Why would they even BOTHER to do that?

(Example: one person, claiming to have grown up LDS said something like, “If we tried anything like that, it would result in a very stern lecture from some Elder or other.”  Ummm.  Yeah, we have elders in our church structure, but they aren’t in a position to deliver lectures of any kind, and certainly would never show up at the doorstep of your house to do it, the way this person made it sound.  In my limited experience of the kind of thing she’s suggesting – which is honestly just movies and reading – this seems to be a very traditionalist protestant idea – Elders keeping the church in line.  It’s absolutely not us.)

Anyway, the fact that these people HATED us without knowing a thing about us – it made me sick.  Totally disturbing.  And I found myself again wanting to be fireworks, wanting to shoot up in the air in a shower of light and color and brilliance shouting, “SHUT UP.  Just shut up and find out the truth before you condemn people!!!  Take the time to see the beauty that’s there!  Find out before you shoot your mouths off.”

But then, isn’t that what so many people from so many different life places keep pleading over and over these days?  This kind of knee-jerk bigotry and prejudice are hardly limited to one political side, or country or educational level.

The last thing I have to say about this is that the blogs I read are all about home and being married and raising kids and making interesting things by hand  – or just about family news and updates – about people, trying to live intelligent, healthy, creative lives.  A good number of my favorite people aren’t LDS. (you can find most of these blogs – but not all – in my blog roll.)  But they don’t really bring up their faiths – those values and faith bases are revealed in their details, their photographs, the things they love and care about.  Hearts on the line.  Friendship for free.  Mutual support.  Mutual amazement at the richness and glory of life, even though life can be hard and wearing and even desperate.

When people decry the internet or belittle blogging, I am sorry that they haven’t caught this vision: this sharing of experience.  The honest willingness to become connected.  The interest we take in each other’s success and the willingness to suffer along with friends who are suffering.  How have those commenters have missed this?  Or maybe my question is: why would they shy from it?  The answer, I’m afraid, has roots in tragedy.  Real, gut-wrenching tragedy.

Anyway, thank you all – you who write and you who read and all of you who join together, willing to learn and share and care about people you may never even meet face to face.  You have been a gift to me.