Small Encounters

Small Encounters

What if it isn’t enough?

I was talking to my Aunt, a lady who I respect and who has paid her dues for sure, about the loss of civil rights we are suffering along with the other things I think I’ve been all to clear about recently.

She got it. She was nodding, if wearily told me, in her turn, that what I was saying was very close to what she was seeing. Then she said to me “I don’t have time for any of this. I’m a parent. I’ve got to raise my kid.”

I thought about this and when I saw her the next day I said: “OK. You’re a parent so you’re busier than I am that’s for sure, so I don’t have anything to say to you. But I have to just ask you something in response to that. And that is: What if it’s not enough? What if, in addition to all that work you’re doing now to see to the immediate needs, concerns, and aspirations of your child you also have to pay attention to the world at large that that child lives in? What if you have to do that and it isn’t fair and you don’t wanna and you have to do it anyway or you are seriously blowing it for your kid. Except that its not so easy to see as if you had, say, not provided them with shoes. But there it is anyway. So: What if it is not enough?

A Simple Phone Call

A friend called me one night in April of 2003 and spoke to me for 40 minutes about the political social and economic crisis this country is in. I’d known this man for 12 years and he’d not called me in the last 5. When we’d discussed politics in the past, his eyes would glaze over and he’d politely wait for me to discuss something interesting.

He called me. He was impassioned, furious, frightened. The Presidential election(sic) of 2000 is how it started for him too.

So when we got off the phone, I sat for a minute or two. I was filled with wonder. “If people like Kevin are getting angry there’s something going on here.” I started talking to other people myself. I started looking online for news and found myself becoming more and more concerned.

That’s why we may very well be able to call the grassroots liberals the organization that was started by a phone call.

Talking To My Friend

I was talking to my friend, the artist from New York City who called me in April of 2003 and got me started on this rampage of do-gooder activism and educating myself and other people and heaven only knows what else. This was the first Sunday after the election and he told me he’d gone out for drinks with a co worker who was a Republican who’d voted (a moment of silence to brace ourselves for the spoken words) for Bush. He wondered at it; as if he’d invited Jack the Ripper; or a fallen angel; or perhaps some mythic beast that no matter how vilified could not be dismissed: child eating monster or not this creature was surely numbered among the powerful since it was its chosen whose steady finger was on the Button.

He recounted to me, honestly surprised and pleased, that they could talk together about the election(?) and even joke about it and even found common ground of various kinds.

Oh, oh it gets us. No matter how educated and sensitive and sophisticated you think you are, that human need to be part of a group that is better than any other is difficult to escape because as a strategy of propagating your genes it certainly doesn’t hurt to passionately believe that the people who bear them are better than others.

My friend is no yahoo. He’s educated, an artist, usually prepared to be open minded, curious about people different than he. And he fell into this Us/Them, Blue/Red, Good/Evil stuff. We all do. I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t at least slip into it from time to time.