I have been in a funk and giving myself a pity party for the last several weeks. First I realized my magical year was ending as my 58th birthday rolled around a couple weeks ago. Born in 1957 my 57th year was to be magical or golden according to contemporary mythology I chose to embrace. This past year has been eventful, but magical is stretching it a bit. Then I realized I celebrated the wrong year. Damn.
I should have known this as my 49th birthday forever stands out in my memory as the day I was escorted from a U.S. Armed Services Senate Committee hearing because I called Donald Rumsfeld a liar and Ted Stevens who was chairing the session said “Get that woman out of here.” After being escorted out the door to the sidewalk I spoke with a Vietnamese delegation of business men who were on a tour of Capitol Hill.
A culmination of pro-peace activism that began 38 years earlier when my brother was horrifically wounded in Vietnam juxtaposed with finding a trade group of the same country against whom my brother fought was a coupling that made me realize that individual soldiers really are just fodder for corporate interests. Awareness of all sorts descended upon me during that 50th year when I fully came into my own.
That day in D.C. began my 50th year that would find me caring for my mother in the last month of her life in her home 2000 miles away from my home and family a year later on my 59th birthday. Somehow my family did not send a card not even a call. It was not the best of times, but it was a learning time, and there was much healing between my mother and me. The experience of that year taught me something that should have been obvious before it became real to me. The first year ends with the celebration of the 1st birthday or 1st wedding anniversary. The 50th year ends with the 50th birthday, the 57th year ends with the 57th birthday.
So I missed my magical year, thinking the 58th year was the 57th year. My magical year was not this past year, but the year before. Now I have to go through my blogs and journals and photos and find out how my 57th year, May 2013 to May 2014, really was.
This was a real downer of a realization after a less than eventful Mother’s Day opened the week leading up to my birthday. And I had all these event descriptions and photos picked out for a summary post about the year.
Something began to dawn on me when my daughter called to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day, bless her, and she asked if her dad had announced his usual insensitive Mother’s Day comment, repeated every year, “You are not my mother, so I didn’t get you anything.” Twenty-five years of being told this gets very old. I told her he did indeed say this again. We both just groaned and shook our heads.
My husband does not do presents well. Unless someone applies constant reminders or pressure, he “forgets.” I know after talking to many, many spouses of scientists and academic researchers that this tendency to forget about the importance of real world events is a character trait of many ridiculously bright people. I am not sure it is so much that this type of person cannot remember such things, but they have been taught by our culture that they do not need to bother with such mundane world occurrences.
So weekend one, Mothers Day, less than stellar. Weekend two, birthday, less than marvelous. Then Memorial Day, weekend three and this is the first Memorial Day for me since my brother passed away last November. He was a casualty of the Vietnam War although it took 45 years for him to succumb to the physical injuries and psychic wounds he suffered in Hue and Khe Sanh. My parents are gone. Three of my four brothers are deceased.
Let me tell you that all this really sucks. I have spent most of my adult life dealing with depression. I have it under control, so I no longer bottom out and become mired in black pits of despair. But lethargy and lack of focus can and will descend when I do not actively countermand the early stage of a downward spiral. I have gotten much better at reframing when something triggers recursive negative thinking.
I have even accepted that sometimes I need to incorporate the negative realizations into my worldview so that next time I experience them I do not spend so much energy fighting them and pushing them back down into the subconscious. Acknowledge and go on.
These past three weeks of realization have not been fun, but they were probably part of an experience that needed to be lived through. I have come to trust myself when it comes to almost unconsciously doing what I need to do. I wish I could count on someone to do things for me when they need to be done, but all I have is me. And I do have me. I am strong, resilient, intelligent, and caring.
I suspect we all need to learn to support ourselves more than we do, to be our own best friends, because we do walk through this life as an individual. In my case I am an individual who is 58, in her 59th year, headed toward my 59th birthday next May.
Self-Indulgent Micro-Focus on Piffle Must Stop
There is a problem in the world. One problem. We are killing ourselves.
We have an inter-connected world in which tiny, myopic, and dysfunctional communities are chafing from rubbing up against communities with opposing and equally dysfunctional bases.
Once the world was a big enough place that opposing ideologies simply widened the geographic distance between themselves and expanded, as the need developed, into places where humans had not yet settled. After that was impossible we then overran or exterminated low population densities of peoples who had the misfortune of being where the better armed or larger group(s) decided to expand.
We have now come to a place where we have to find a different, better, survivable method of dealing with the desire to conquer place and people.
No I am not putting forward a solution. I have ideas as to some of the things that a livable solution might want to incorporate, but I believe that humanity as a whole will have to come up with a solution. That whole will have to value all life, people who look or think differently from themselves, and all the women from those groups. This is the only way I can find to a place where we might be able to come up with a viable way to live together and figure out how to survive the next century or two when everything that has been a given for centuries or millennia will change or disappear.
I believe, and this is personal belief that I would expect any other person to have exactly the same belief, that we are at a very a cultural, earthly tipping point where extinction of humanity and many if not most of Earth’s species along with us is on one side of a narrowing path toward a tipping point where we as a species will fall into rapid movement toward this side or another side where this unsustainable, competitive, territorial, and violence-based cultural system is replaced by a system based on other distinctly different organizing principles such as cooperative distribution systems and speech-based conflict resolution.
All I know for sure is that we cannot continue to exist if the only thing all people do is develop new ways to kill each other and ultimately ourselves.
Solutions anyone?
I know we will need a better understanding of what is going on around us if we are to evolve culturally. For example, where do you think the biggest loss of life to terrorism occurred last week? If you said France, you need to change how and where you get your news. Your task if you don’t know is to find out where over 2000 people were killed last week. Let’s all expand our micro-focus beyond our own tiny neighborhoods.
My next post will provide the answer to the question I asked in the previous paragraph.
You Knew A Rant Was Coming!
Why are people so stupid? Why do people support actions and people that work against there own interests? They do you know. It is a Horatio Alger thing. Only smart people will get that reference.
Well, I chalk it up (maybe I should say chuck it up) to evolution. Yep. Most people, even really educated ones, do not understand the concept of evolution. Survival of the fittest is a rather misleading shorthand phrase. Fittest does not mean best. Fit only means having reproduced oneself biologically. If you live to pass on your traits you have been successful evolutionarily. You are fit. The fittest means leaving behind the most surviving offspring.
Intelligence is not a fit trait. At least not high intelligence. The more educated someone is the fewer children that person is likely to have. Presuming education equates at some level with intelligence, having fewer children than everyone else is going to mean there are very few intelligent people in the population.
Culture is supposed to evade this fact of life by being the way we pass on information outside of the biological dictates of genetics. Culture allows us pass on knowledge to individuals who share no family connections with us.
Basically, intelligence helps us all, but it doesn’t stop the ignorant from overpopulating the planet by at least one half.
And who am I calling stupid? You really want me to make enemies don’t you?
- Well adherents of the extremist Quiverfull brand of über-patriarchal fundamentalism for one. Actually the males in this cult are exhibiting an often-practiced male animal behavior. It is the social chador American ultra-conservative American Fundamentalism.
- Fox News watchers, secondly. ’nuff said.
- Climate change deniers.
- Namby-Pamby Democrats who try to avoid any strong and or progressive stands.
- Republicans who know they are liars.
If we do not start using the knowledge we have, then well, we deserve the massive multi-system collapse that awaits us within just a few years from economic, environmental, and climatic catastrophes.
Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe is almost certainly the next chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is an idiot.
There I ranted. You can stop holding your breath now.
First World Problems
On a recent weekend I spent the morning thinking about women, education, empowerment, information, fundamentalism and the tremendous power we fortunate women who have access to social media and the time to use it are frittering away. I am not lecturing, I am as guilty as anyone.
First of all, I do not expect every woman to want to be political. I understand that politics is man’s game, that is, a game where the rules were created by men. Our current political system is derived from previous systems and those trace back to territorial and resource protective strategies as old as human communities. Rancor is ever-increasing, and it was not great to begin with.
I really do understand wanting to stay out of the fray. To live a functional life I have to manage my stress level quite carefully. Bumping over a stress limit can send me into a fit of tears and fight/flight behavior that is nearly impossible for comfortable folks to fathom. I have learned to recognize these very thing lines between acceptable and melt down levels fairly well and only veer off course a couple of times a year.
Some of this may be my basic constitution that infused my personality with a toughness and resilience long before any trauma and situational stress triggering of post traumatic stress reactions ever came into play. But maybe I learned to be tough after living through nasty situations and breaking through barriers in my path.
But all that said, I expect women who are aware, intelligent, and informed to do everything they possibly can to help others who do not have the luxury of time and money to spend on activities that do not directly support food, shelter and basic hygiene in their lives. Most of the world is hungry, has no access to clean water, water with which to wash, nor access to toilets.
If I can keep knocking away at the problems as I see them and keep crafting solutions as best I can, almost everyone can.
In basic anthropology courses I took when I was an undergraduate, I was exposed to the concepts of environmental degradation, climate change, and that pandemics and starvation are likely to emerge when ecosystems, if not the entire biosphere, begin to fluctuate and exhibit crazy flip-flops looking for a new balance. No guarantees that humans will be around when a new balance emerges. That was a long time ago. We’ve known. Those of us who understood have not been silent, and are not silent now, but most of the women I know, even the really smart ones, avoid thinking about unpleasantries of what life will be like in a decade or two.
We can change things. But we have to act. Now. A major opportunity exists in form of elections next month.
I personally believe if enough of us decide to write about making intelligent choices in this election, in light of current events, that we can have a significant influence on how our women readers think about the issues and get them to the polls. I will be writing pieces about ebola, fundamentalism (as in ISIL,) infrastructure, community, and scientific/critical thinking. I hope these will give others ideas as to how they can frame issues.
Let’s do it.
Dreams of Strength and Wisdom
Sometimes things seem to align. Right now the writings of several people I read, the comments on my posts, and just knowing and having met many of these women writers in the last year or so convinces me that there is a wisdom brewing.
Many of us write from monikers real, imagined, or somewhere in between out in cyberspace, that suggest midpoints in midlife, although I think we all know that the midpoint of our lives is apt to be behind us unless we live to be over 100.
I cannot speak for the other women, but I know that for me I have been thinking about the ending of individual lives and how we personally feed into the human legacy. I realize that I might be a bit young to be thinking about what we leave behind, but I guess I tend to be an outlier in most things. As an anthropologist I am intrigued by what we as individuals add to the nebulous collective of knowledge and structures and rules that we call culture. Recently facing the reality of probably losing another brother in the near future brings the theoretical into the world of personal, practical, nitty-gritty reality.
I am 57. I am an elder of the Late Boomer Cohort within the so-called Baby Boom Generation. Sid Vicious and I were born within a week of each other and I have taken on the comparison as a mantle so as to show that Punks obviously delineated something significant breaking away from our older Hippie brothers and sisters. I try to use female examples wherever possible, but I have not found an easily recognized icon of my own gender that fits the bill as well as Sid does. Patti Smith rose up in the rock world at the same time as Sid, but she is one of the oldest of the Boomer Gen. I guess that shows that women of the Boom couldn’t sneak through the cracks into the new cultural paradigm until a critical mass of change burst through the barriers and opened a new ecosystem, or at least a new niche, defined by a new level of open communication and personal determination.
Women began to really come into their own when reliable birth control allowed larger and larger numbers of women to direct the course of their lives more than at any point in human history. The later born boomers are the women who were just becoming sexually active as Roe v. Wade was decided. The 1970s were where the trends of the 1960s became real in the lives of the culture as a whole. The last half of the Boomer Generation are the first women to have had self-determination for all of their adult lives. We are also the first group of women to have a level of comfort with the interconnectivity that the online world brings with it.
This is a shift of seismic proportions that is still playing out as human culture works this development into the mix. Women who are of an age to become a wise woman, an elder, to sit at the grandmothers’ counsel right now have perspective that was impossible to fathom even a generation ago.
The balance of power is shifting. Let us continue to work toward wisdom, as the women elders we are developing into have more important work in preservation of the world and humanity, as part of that living system, than any generation has faced. We are up to the task. We are finding our way, making our way.