HOW A BROAD BECOMES BROAD-MINDED

A recent post (the one about 9/11 and a deceased relative from my father’s family) brought a “push-back” message from a cousin my age.  As babies our mothers -- who were happy sisters-in-law -- thought it was funny to exchange our clothes.   He’s conservative, prosperous, retired, king of his nuclear family, not a college grad, and in California.  As a kindness to me (besides praying for me) he wanted to straighten out my thinking.  Those who know me can guess how that worked out.

My cousin wants conformity to evangelical Christian ideals.  Several forces combined to create in me an openness to “different,” even strange or dangerous people and places.   In fact, I’m attracted to them, intrigued by them. Those people do NOT want to be identified or even described in detail, but I can make a list of the forces that made me so different from my cousin.

1.  WWII meant a lot of people had experience with other places.  They had gone around the world armed and in uniform -- nothing like the backpackers of today or the explorers of the 19th century -- but their awareness was high.  I’m finding today’s veterans likewise have a high consciousness of Third World people and a good deal of sympathy for them.  Maybe less when they are the American internal Third World.

2.  My NE Portland, OR, childhood neighborhood of modest houses was mostly occupied by European emigrants with skills like machining or fine woodwork or baking.  They owned inherited tools.  They had accents and spoke longingly of their homelands.

Martin and Osa Johnson on camera safari

3.  My mother always felt positively towards American Indians and Asians, I think because as a child her family attended talks by missionaries.  My father was fond of National Geographic type lectures.  Remember “Savage Splendor” with Martin and Osa Johnson?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218580/   Osa delicately cutting slices from a cake made of compressed gnats?  I'll bet Jane Goodall remembers!

4.  Reading, which included every fairy tale, legend, myth and tale in the local library plus the earliest sci-fi (First my father’s H.G. Wells, then Heinlein and on from there).

5.  My father’s cache of sex books.  (see earlier post)

6.  A slowly rising population of blacks, non-threatening and interesting at that point.  Not scary until black empowerment, shooting gangs, and swaggering basketball players.  When I worked for the City of Portland in the Nineties, many of my co-workers were black, smart, assertive and willing to share.

7.  Strong social consciousness through my father’s prairie humanism and progressivism.  The bus to downtown passed the doorway of a gypsy community in a warehouse; passed one of the original Skid Rows on Burnside; passed the X-rated movie and burlesque houses.  I was always curious, not scared. My father said when I was 18, he'd take me to see a burlesque show, but that was before my mother caught his eye.

8.  A right-wing, condemning, self-righteous Presbyterian minister in Portland had a boomerang effect, a college education threw open all religious doors, and a reservation Methodist minister (Jim Bell) embraced everyone and later became a missionary.  This walked me into Unitarian-Universalism.  In those days my minister Alan Deale was one of a posse of enlightened, dynamic, activist PNWD ministers.  Though I walked on out later, sort of, they were good years, a fine education.  But the groundwork had been laid at NU with the acting training.  What are the person's motives, the sub-texts, the social forces?  What would it be like to BE this person.  Forget good/bad.

9.  In 1961 when I came to the Blackfeet reservation, Indian kids in high school formed a cohort for progress that has since made huge strides:  Eloise Cobell, Darrell Kipp, Stu Miller, Curly Bear Wagner, Willie Sharp, Robey Clark, and dozens of others became the seeds of “let’s do it” social activism.  It was the era of JFK and MLK.  At the same time I was riding alongside Bob Scriver into places and situations that only his generation (b. 1914) even knew existed.  Because he was a judge and because we were white, I was protected, and therefore could risk facing violence, sexism, and general racist bad treatment without much political danger.  

10.  As an animal control officer in Portland, wearing the Multnomah County sheriff’s uniform going house-to-house, I got a good look at how bad lives can be, little pockets of pure misery and crime.  People who had been dead for months, unmissed.  Dogs tortured to death.  My enlightened boss Mike Burgwin (who had been a Martinez, CA cop) pushed us to solutions beyond punishment.  Other people reached out to help.  Standing on the cop side of the law is always revelatory about matters outsiders only see on television shows.

11.  The UU movement, both as a lay person and as clergy, at that time focused on both process and progress:  why is society so hard on some, so easy on others?  What personal constructs would not just be protective but also helpful for everyone?  What’s driving patterns from under the surface?  After I had been ordained, the status was a kind of figurative Tyvek hazmat suit  that was even better than my sheriff’s badge, except that my parishioners were often afraid for me to intervene.  They wanted their social action to be theory, not practice.  I was frustrated.  I am not a knee-jerk liberal, sometimes not even liberal.

12.  The rise of misery-lit, often autobiographical, converged with a wave of Native American Lit (recently one of the major booksellers of the country did not recognize the abbreviation “Nat Lit”). Some of it was capitalizing on sensationalism, but much of it was earnest and real. I read it all, indiscriminately, regardless of the author.  Quality did not depend upon ethnicity.

13.  My aging mother was now willing to tell me the truth about people I thought I had known.  Teachers who were in quiet “Boston marriages.”  A boy down the street who had been our babysitter hung himself in Macleay Park.  When I thought back, there were many realizations that explained puzzling events.  Classmates who must have been autistic or schizophrenic. Two alcoholic great-uncles never mentioned, excluded, probably traumatized by war in the Phillippines.  An insane uncle who scared my cousins.  A great-uncle whose wife was demented and institutionalized for decades but who instead of divorcing her quietly built a life with lady friends.  A Chinook Indian teacher who never married and who was occasionally in tears over family problems.  A strict Dean of Women from my high school so troublesome in old age that the nursing home where she lived charged her a premium to cover the extra costs of constantly replacing her careworkers. 

14.  I’ll read anything written in a language I can read, including porn, rabble-rousing and torture -- until I feel my emotions buckling.  But I don't read on the computer.  I can get into enough trouble with used book sources.  Much of it is just boring or repellent, but there are things out there that are revelatory, to use religious language; mind-blowing to use sexual language; and enlightening to use the language of Mazda.  That’s what I pursue.  My cousin does NOT.  Emphatically does not.  It’s good that he prays for me, but we could not wear each other’s clothing now even if we wanted to.

Can you tell who's from California?

People who look for me on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social media complain that I'm invisible.  The "socials" never read this blog, except when I send it to them because it's about family. That's not quite true -- I have a distant cousin none of the others know and I only know by email -- she's quite a lot like me and she reads the blog.  Some friends think this blog is TMI. They probably shouldn't read this post.