Welcome home!
By Dan Bodine
The photo that greeted me (gasp!) when I opened the Austin American Statesman today on the arrival of troops back home to the United States threw me overboard. Mentally. What happened? I asked. Life’s toner control seemed to be out of control.
It led to reflections that part of the problem we as a people have in worshipping society change today is that we have lost respect for each other’s private feelings. Indeed, bold, public statements have come to validate signature lifestyles. Gender freedom included, in this instance. But at what cost to public decency? Or what’s left of it?
This situation, admittedly, was compounded by circumstanc. One of the crewmembers, in this case a woman, happened to be selected to symbolize a Navy ship’s formal return home to port, and to their families--with a ritual kiss. She was a lesbian, it turned out. The ol’ captain may have felt awkward, but, hey, it’s now national policy, mates, was probably his thought.
But these Gotta make it expressions, such as the two women kissing, we’re so driven to make now, so fervently, they have become our national sop. (Has there even been a period in history where so damn many body tattoos are permitted, another example?)
And consequently we’re going from literature’s proverbial stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud (All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren) in a constant state of hyper active flux and anxiety, consciously worrying often only about when “the next shoe…”
This is not a matter of being old-fogy, backward, stupid, politically incorrect, provincial in thought, etc., mates. No!
It’s a matter we’re not being considerate enough of each other’s feelings--considerate enough not to shock without a warning, if you will--that we’re in effect labeling each other as irrelevant, minimalizing each other in the pursuit of individual self-expression.
(And, no, I have no idea as to how the Navy could‘ve done this occasion better, once it realized whose name had been selected for the ritual Homecoming Kiss. Maybe filmed it privately for the couple‘s adoptive grandkids later? Sold private proceeds for a new ship--USS Bustout!)
Problems with rapid changes on psyches, as played upon by shocking emotions like this, are legendary throughout history, of course.
Maybe we’re even in the throes now of another planetary Uranus-Pluto cyclical alignment, who knows! A conjunction change, perhaps, as happened from ‘60 to ‘72 in our nation’s great civil rights period for African Americans.
Whatever, we’ve been in a relentless drive since our founding, it seems--like a lake enduring its annual thermal stratification process called turning over--to have ourselves judged solely on “the content of our character,” as in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We’ve essentially minimalized or reduced our individual personality traits to the point we’ve forced out yet a new second-class citizen, the radical non-conformist, to pummel.
Which is fine with me normally, for as a retired, small-town judge forced to deal with these idiots for 18 years I know I’m prejudiced against them anyway.
But somehow I think that’s missing the boat on what we as a nation want to be--One Nation Under God. The farther we push along the string it seems, the more class warfare we end up having to overcome. There’s not a Point Unity somewhere?
Really, those in your 60s now, think back at what you’ve witnessed over your lifetime as this so-called agent of cultural change has transformed us as a society.
I still remember, for instance, the first year of our high school’s integration in Cleburne, TX, when I returned home from my first year at college at Christmas break, shocked at seeing blacks attending the downtown Esquire Theatre, of all places.
That would be followed by yeas of huge civil rights marches and the assassination of our president; the cruelties of the Vietnam War flushed up onto our living room televisions; drugs and the topless craze of the 70s and 80s pushing freedoms of sex and nudity a la mode throughout America; women entering politics in droves and even dominating in many instances; and then of course here we are back to civil rights again.
The five and dime stores of our youth, the mom and pop‘s and traditional family farms all have been replaced by a descending oligarchic layer of insensitive corporate greed smothering our lives. And it's left us with sheer boredom and dullness mostly, and with all kinds of conflicting emotions of how we do this or that; or remember not to do this or that.
We’re to the point we’re not suppose to feel Life at all but merely genuflect to it as corpocracy passes it by us.
Ya’ll just passing through? Don’t pay no attention to us any, ‘ya hear?! we’ve become quite adept at saying to strangers. Nothing attaches.
And now we’re allowing the photographing of men-to-men and women-to-women kissing to be pasted in our very public newspapers, and are not supposed to utter any consternation other than, Oh, my.
In our rush for level playing fields--our drive to excel at every facet of life--we’ve minimalized ourselves as human beings, I continue to argue.
To the point it makes you want to say, Lord, please…Somebody, damn it!…Give me a break!
Forget about what’s right or wrong! Just for a little while? Ok? I need to scream. One little moment, please? A scream moment?
Everybody rise, please. Get up, get up. Ok, now. On three. …a One, and a Two, and a T-T-Three…
“Silver bells, ghostly tales, it’s Christmas time in the city…”
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