RCG-I Seasonal Salon Summer Solstice 2004
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Summer Solstice 2004 Home Page Do you see the forest or the trees? |
Do you see the forest or the trees?Daña AlderDoes one iota of negativity ever ruin something for you? If you discover something distasteful or offensive or downright criminal about someone or some group, does it taint your view of everything else that they do? Or do you think that you should rise above it and take whatever good you can find, no matter what else is in the mix? Or, as with so many things in life, is the answer, "It depends," ? Years ago, in one of this country's previous wars (Vietnam to be specific), I had a framed peace dove drawing by Picasso that gave me great pleasure, a simple way of expressing my deeply held pacifist ideals. Then in the 1980s, his history of partner-beating became public, and I've never been able to view that dove as representing peace since. While I know that we're all complex beings, capable of great good and terrible bad, sometimes learning about a flaw - or maybe it's just particular flaws - can spoil my ability to appreciate the good that same individual can offer. Almost 40 years ago when I was 16, my best friend's mom accused me of being a lesbian and seducing her daughter. It got pretty ugly, with her spreading her fears throughout our small community and me flipping out. I didn't yet know that I was a lesbian, and I certainly had not seduced her daughter, but that didn't make her accusations any easier to live with. Luckily, I found a staunch supporter in my high school history teacher who became my de facto therapist over six of the awfullest months a high school senior could have. I went to school every morning early and stayed every afternoon late, talking with Maryann and trying to make sense out of my small world gone quite mad. In the years since, whenever I've told my coming out story, I've credited Maryann with saving my life, a claim that I still make for her today. After my years in high school and then college ended and I started moving around with just a thin tether to my parents' home, Maryann and I lost touch, a connection we weren't to re-establish for 30 years. Back in the mid-1990s with this new toy called the internet, I searched for several people from my past, Maryann among them. And I found her, retired, in Florida. I called, we talked, we exchanged email addresses and emailed a lot. Then I paid her a visit, combined with a visit to my favorite aunt and another high school friend (the earlier non-seducee, to be precise) also living in Florida. As Maryann and I communicated over the months and miles, some obvious differences in politics became apparent, she being to the far right of most republicans and me usually finding liberal too mild a word to describe my own beliefs. But that kind of thing didn't necessarily bother me, as I've always had friends with different views. Oh, occasionally she'd send me a bad email joke about Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquidick , but that was about the worst of it. Last fall, Maryann gave me some photos of herself. In one of these photos she is at a Mardi Gras-type party, and part of her costume is something I can only describe as repugnantly racist. As I looked at the photo, I was at first in deep shock, unable to even understand what this thing was, much less see how it could be part of someone's party outfit. Seeing this image threw me into turmoil. I felt that I had to say something, but couldn't at first even calm down enough to articulate my thoughts. And I knew I would never feel the same about Maryann. One of the things my friends in social justice movements have taught me is that we have choices when confronting an -ism. We can say/ask things in a way that addresses our own feelings, or we can say/ask them in a way that's intended to try to understand the other person's view. One of the techniques for doing this is to ask, Can you help me understand why you, how you, whatever....? The person who taught me this way said that many of us, when asked, Why did you...? or How did you...?, are thrust back into our childhoods, when someone in authority was usually doing the asking and there was often no acceptable answer. (Why did you slam the door again? Why didn't you clean up your room like I told you to?) He reasoned that, Can you help me understand...?, re-casts the question as a request that gives the askee the opportunity to be helpful and can lead to better understanding between people. At first, though, I reacted to this photo by starting many a letter, drafting many an email, splaying my anger and other feelings out there to her in an orgy of emotion. I knew any possibility of closeness between us was gone, so at first I didn't even care how much invective I poured on the page. I still have my standards as a writer, though, and I was also trying to decide just what approach I wanted to take, what I wanted to result from responding to her, so I spent some significant time drafting and trying to put my feelings into just the right words. As I did this, time was passing and into the back of my mind crept the thought that maybe it would all just pass -- maybe I could take the path of least resistance and things would just take their natural course and we would drift apart, with our greatest connection remaining 40 years in the past. Then, she sent me another picture in the same costume. The email with her picture had been titled Fun at ____. I sat at my computer and wrote to her something like: "When you gave me a similar picture a while back, you described your costume as ____. I'm curious...can you help me understand why this is fun to you? To wear ____?" I used an economy of words very unlike me and one that intended no judgment, no splayed feelings, just a simple request. And I sent it off. I've not heard back from her in four months, and I suspect that I probably won't. Maybe my question came off as judgmental in ways that I can't see. Maybe she felt challenged by my question. Maybe the repugnance I felt came through in spite of my best efforts to rise above it. I don't know, but I do know that when I saw these photos, my view of Maryann changed forever. We are all complex beings, filled with the potential for heroism and craven cowardice, capable of doing the right thing against untold odds, but equally able to betray others. When we're confronted with questions or challenges in life, our values, our beliefs, our experiences and our knowledge of our own capacities often take us to one path or the other. But most of our lives are filled with little opportunities to say who we are by the choices we make -- this costume or that? this book or that? --. I know that Maryann saved my life 40 years ago, and I believe that since then, I've earned my life many times over, and it's now my own. Was that the main lesson for me through this experience? Or was the lesson for me to learn to take the bad with the good? Or was it a challenge to confront something difficult with someone who once held great authority with me? Time will tell. |
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