Trey's Days No. 2.

1-22-11

His nose sweated beads of liquid in a steady slow ooze for which he carried a little white towel and dabbed every few minutes, especially during parts of his lecture which he found exciting. His belly shook and the buckle of the giant belt which went around the widest part of him bounced up and down. His favorite personal anecdotes, of which there were hundreds, involved his days at a prestigious Protestant seminary in a big city, where he was encouraged to play scholar. It is clear after a few minutes of his pedagogy that he is first and foremost a Protestant preacher whose forte might not be scholarship.

Now, there were days when a lesson in ethics got taught by one of the authors on the reading list in his “Ethics and Society” class, and the lecture was thin enough or short enough so as not to completely obscure the message. Most days one question from a smart mouth could hijack the agenda and send him off to that time in seminary when “...we were in 'Kant' class and everybody's eyes just GLAAAAZED over and I said....” (punch line, followed by forced laughter from the 'audience.')

One of those days when a philosopher of ethics was able to break through the noise came when we read “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin. If you haven't read it and want to, stop here (spoiler alert). It's a haunting tale of a little Utopia whose blissful existence depends on the perpetual suffering of a scapegoat. When citizens reach the age of majority, they are shown the suffering boy on whose torment they depend and they have to make a decision whether to go on enjoying the good life in Omelas at the expense of the suffering scapegoat, or to walk away.

William James talked about the “hideousness” of enjoying a utopian existence at the expense of one wretched scapegoat on the edge of things, whose perpetual torment is the price for that utopian bliss. But honestly I think I would have been one of the ones who stayed in Omelas. There are several reasons we can give for staying. One, because walking away presumes that we have an ethic that is superior to the whole community, which is suspicious. Two, walking away does not free the wretched scapegoat. And three, staying allows for the possibility of a dialogue in the community that might find a solution to the scapegoat dependent nature of things. It may in fact turn out that utopian bliss is not scapegoat dependent after all. That was a myth. One sure way to find out is to free the scapegoat and see.

Similar to the Omelas conundrum is the village Shirley Jackson creates in “The Lottery”, (spoiler alert 2). Communities in both stories have to decide whether to continue hideous systems in order to maintain the relative happiness of the community. In “The Lottery” when some of the villagers say they are thinking about quitting the practice of regularly choosing by lottery one among their number to be stoned to death, they are told that quitting might lead to going back to living in caves. It seems a story told generations ago by the elders still holds sway, and no one dares stop the old practice for fear that ancient warnings might come true.

After watching a couple of documentaries,“Food Inc.” by Mark Kenner and “The Corporation”, by Achbar, Abbott, & Bakan, it appears that all of us as consumers either feed the machine, or feed the machine while making efforts not to. In a sense when we walk into a grocery store where there are thousands of selections which are available all year 'round, we are choosing to feed the corporate system that makes it possible. All the cruelty to animals, use of hormones and antibiotics in food, exploitation of migrant workers, de-forestation of the planet, pollution from chemicals used in agriculture, etc. becomes ours. By continuing to participate we are the ones who stay in Omelas, the ones who continue the lottery, who continue to punish the scapegoat in order to maintain the wonderful life we have all come to expect. In our case the scapegoats are animals who live lives of unimaginable suffering, workers who are treated like animals, a planet that groans under the weight of unsustainable practices, and our own bodies which are over fed on the wrong foods.

And yet, even knowing and accepting this, I wonder: who were the ones who walked away from Omelas? Where were they going? Did they know? What if the villagers in “The Lottery” stopped the macabre practice to see what would happen? Would they really go back to caves?

We have a choice in our world to not participate in the corporate raping and pillaging of our planet and the systematic abuse of working humanity. But how? How can we free ourselves when we live in a world in which we are so inextricably embedded in a corporate system, where the 24 hour market is a way of life, where mass production and year 'round consistency seem like necessities, where the corporate label seems to offer some security? We are warned by corporate opinion makers that we'll starve and be cold if we try to unplug. The back-to-the-landers didn't age so well they say, and ultimately had to come in for dental work. But some persist in testing the old myth that freeing the scapegoat will bring down Utopia, stopping the lottery will have us back in caves, that without the Monsanto corporate farm we'll starve.

Today on National Public Radio there was a story about a swap meet of sorts where folk swap canned goods. Not the kind you find at Kroger or Walmart but jars of beets, honey, okra, peas and pickles, they had grown and put up themselves. “Put up” for our youthful citizens means taking vegetables from a backyard garden, at the peak of ripeness, and putting them “up” in jars for eating later like my grandmother used to do with fig preserves. These swap meet participants were young and old, men and women, every color and stripe. They increased the variety of their own gardens by swapping with their neighbors. And there are many communities joining this growing trend, growing, canning and swapping.

It is with mixed emotions that we are forced to notice that Walmart started carrying organic vegetables because their customers asked for them. We would be right to have trepidation when a manager whose sole motivation must of necessity be profit, appears to embrace the earth friendly alternative. BP after all invests in solar power, or at least advertising that mentions solar power. Our choices here are not as clear as walking away or not, stopping the lottery or not. It's complicated! But we can rest assured that once we know we cannot unknow. Once the unintended consequences of our habits are revealed, we really do have a simple choice. We can choose right this very minute to live into the adult awareness that our glittering city depends on a whole underclass of scapegoats. We can choose right this very minute to change one small habit and then another to move Omelas closer to freeing the scapegoat. By making one small change and then another, we can test the myth that if we stop the lottery we'll wake up in a cave. We can dismantle the earth raping, labor abusing, corporate profit machine, one little change at a time. And when we reach the end of our journey and it appears that we have failed, we can dare to trust that we are going to join the ones who walked away and we will know at last where they were going.

I have to admit I was tempted to walk away from Professor Preacher's Ethics class. Overcoming the impulse to walk away had its reward though. Enduring the parts that were objectionable, sacrificing my selfish desire to have it just as I would have it, yielded the lesson of the ones who walked away. It seems inescapable that all the personal anecdotes about big city seminary were just part of a community experience that had at the heart of it something wholly good. It makes me grateful that at least in that one instance I didn't walk away.

Thanks Daddy

Trey's Days No. 1

1-11-11

If you have survived long enough to have elderly parents you may relate with a conversation I had with my sister the other day. Our dad is 75. He is pretty incapacitated by orthopedic problems. He is in a lot of pain most of the time. He has decided that the barometric pressure in Mississippi where he lives is such a significant factor in his condition that he needs to move to the Smokey Mountains, or somewhere with some altitude. Problem is he can't do it, his wife isn't moving, and my sister and I are at a loss as to how to help him, knowing that moving is probably not an option.

All this reflection on my dad's condition and the responsibility of being a grown child got me thinking about how we become who we are, different from our parents yet owing to them much of our identity. As a gay man, I have had my differences with the prevailing social paradigm of the deep south where my parents both grew up. As our parents age and we find them needing our care, it is a good time to look at who we have become and how we have become our own people, benefiting from the gifts of parents but able to shake off the constraints under which a previous generation were doomed to live. At the end of the day my father's greatest gift is freedom and a mind to become who I am. He may not have even known that is what he was giving me, (but I suspect he did). It is received loud and clear. Thanks Daddy!

When Alice Babbette Toklas and Gertrude Stein created their life together, they dared to create the life of each for themselves. They would have the life they wanted for themselves, the world who did not understand be damned. When Gertrude wrote, she wrote what she wrote and if people understood it and published it, great. If they didn't she wondered why, but she fought to keep from changing her writing. She was a revolutionary. She did not want to become what other people were expecting. She was the Gertrude for Gertrude. And she found Alice. Alice was the Alice for Alice. They found each other and were able to be the Gertrude for Gertrude and the Alice for Alice for each other. They did not need to change for the other or to change the other. Alice understood the Gertrude for Gertrude and Gertrude understood the Alice for Alice. Now in the Paris of the early twentieth century to which they fled, and in their living room on Saturday nights there was this whole little society who were being themselves for themselves. Sometimes the world got it and sometimes not; mostly not. But they would not change for the world but kept being themselves for themselves.

There is the issue of means. It seems that the ones who were best able to keep on being themselves for themselves the world be damned, were the ones who had the means to run off to Paris, or Mallorca or where ever, and somehow when they arrived there was a letter of introduction from somebody famous and a check to pay the bills for a few months. So off they went, to collect Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, and to write in the way of the Cubists: “to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split hairs. This is our duty and our pleasure...Every day we get up and say we are awake today. By this we mean that we are up early and we are up late. We eat our breakfast and smoke a cigar.”* . They made haute cuisine just for a few friends, lived with museum pieces, wore what they made out of their imagination, and created a world for themselves in one apartment in Paris when no one else understood and they didn't care.

But Gertrude and Alice were unusual. It appears to me from listening to some very accomplished professionals that many reach a point at which they have acted out the pattern of the existing paradigm for so long it is no longer who they are. (warning: cleric alert) I hear that at some point in their lives there was a fork in the road. This is that fork which represents a paradigm shift in terms of how one is in the world, or who one is in the world. One can either take the turn that means being something completely different, seeing the world as if through a different lens, or one can do what is expected, stay on the straight path, and become a false representation of what one has become, in order to be what the world of the old prevailing paradigm has expected, and continues to expect.

This is exactly what Gertrude and Alice refused to do. They refused to continue to be what the society around them in the United States expected of them. In the early twentieth century, part of that expectation was that a woman would marry a man and have children. Instead, Gertrude and Alice married each other and had Basket, their white standard poodle, who was succeeded by Basket II. It required moving to France, and never living in the US again, which is sad, but they insisted on making a world for themselves that was both true to themselves and against the prevailing paradigm and social order.

Now, some will call this “self indulgent” as if to say that “self indulgent” is an indictment which is self explanatory and obviously bad. It is not obvious that living true to oneself and against the prevailing old paradigm is either self indulgent or bad. I have heard that those who partner and have children have an evolutionary advantage over those who are single. I've also seen studies that show folk who are religious live longer than those who are not. It is assumed that there is something about partnering and having a family within the prevailing paradigm which is more adaptive, healthier than not. It has been thought by religious people that there is something inherent to religion which is responsible for the good lifethey enjoy.

But might it be that we have had it backwards? Could it be that living out the prevailing and preferred paradigm, in this case partnering and having a family, or being religious, wins favor with the society, resulting in greater cooperation from the community? So in various ways the community reinforces the lives of those who partner and have children and belong to a religious community and withholds that same reinforcement from those who do not. It could well be that it is this withholding of reinforcement from the community which results in an advantage for those who go along with the prevailing paradigm and not anything in particular about the paradigm itself.

It can be anticipated that many will say there are advantages to having a partner, kids, a religious life, etc. It may be said that the prevailing paradigm becomes the prevailing paradigm by being good. Marrying a person of the opposite sex is adaptive and good. Having children is adaptive and good. Being religious is good for us and so gets adopted as the prevailing paradigm. But are we sure?

Is is not equally likely that there is not anything particularly good about living out the prevailing paradigm; that people like Gertrude and Alice who went against the heterosexual norm, against the procreation paradigm and lived lives for themselves which were revolutionary, show that good lives can be had outside the paradigm. Perhaps lives which are even better can be had outside the paradigm. Perhaps our salvation lies outside the paradigm.

So here's a hope note. The internet and instant digital communication are making it possible for the Gertrudes and Alices of the world to find each other. They are finding each other and creating world wide communities which go against the old prevailing paradigm, whether that be the heterosexual couple with kids, going to church, belonging to the social majority, fill in the blank. That thirst for freedom that required Gertrude and Alice to move to France now is quenched by a virtual community on the internet which is accessible at home, at school, at the library, in a coffee shop, at the airport, nearly everywhere we go. Right this very minute I bet there's a young single lesbian sitting at a west coast airport having a real time conversation with someone in Beijing in whose bed she will be sleeping by tomorrow. And there's a scientist in Little Rock trying to figure out how to cure a babies brain cancer consulting with a doctor in Sweden and another one in the UK. A leather queen in the Mission of San Francisco is hooking up with a not so young lad in Ireland who wants to see America. A childless couple in the Ozarks are chatting with a single school teacher in New Jersey about their Persian cats. And so it goes.

The new prevailing paradigm is that there is no prevailing paradigm except that we connect with those who share enough of our world view to be affirming and affirmed. So thank you Daddy for teaching me the freedom of the mind. Thank you Gertrude and Alice for breaking the mold and showing us the way to find each other and create a world. And thank you computer geeks everywhere for giving us a universe in which we no longer have to move to France to do it.

* Souhami, Diana. Gertrude and Alice. Hammersmith, London.: Pandora Press, 1991.