Not Much Else to Talk About These Days

Our lives, all our lives, have changed so fast and become so limited.  We are trapped in our homes without any idea for how long and whether things will get worse before they get better.  It doesn't help that leaders in more than one country, including this one, are using this virus as a political tool, laying blame on one another and acting inappropriately at every turn. 
We are not fighting an enemy.  There is no malice in this, no conspiracy, no hatred.  This is a disease, and this battle should be fought, not by politicians, but by well-funded scientists who are given everything they need in order to put their minds together and find a way out of this mess.  We have resources, and great intellects at work.  This will end at some point, this enforced isolating.  But I've started to think of it as going on for much longer than a couple of months.  It might be a very long time before we are actually safe from infection, and the doors of the world can open again.
I'm concerned about the effect cabin fever will have on a world of restless, anxious, frustrated people, some of whom are or will become sick, some of whom will be ruined financially.  It is not reassuring to me that there are long lines at gun stores.  Now is the time to prepare ourselves for a long haul, to really dig deep into our finer selves.  We must be very generous and civil with one another.  That's the only way we're going to get through this.

Missing Mom

Mom died suddenly.  She and Dad were on a riverboat cruise on the Mississippi.  He woke up one morning and she was dead.  She was 89, which in her family's history is an early death.

It's not easy to know what to say to someone who is grieving.  Most people said "I'm sorry for your loss" and left it at that, but whether it was perfunctory or heartfelt, it meant very little to me. I longed for people to ask me about her.  My throat ached with wanting to talk about her.  She was still so alive for me; talking about her helped keep her alive.

I wanted people to know her, to get a sense of who she was, because she was not appreciated nearly enough when she was alive.  Not by her husband or her children.  We all loved her, but none of gave her her due.  Not by friends or co-workers or bridge partners.  My cousins may have appreciated her more than her children did because they had something to compare her to.  But to us she was just Mom, put her on Earth for the sole purpose of making us feel loved.

She was the kindest, nicest person anyone has ever met.  I've tried to remember what it was like when she was in a bad mood, but looking through my entire childhood, I've only managed to dig up about three memories: Once when my brother and I were 2 and 5 and making a lot of noise while she was in bed sick, she called us into her bedroom and paddled us.  Once when we were moving yet again into another house in another city, I saw her with her lips compressed because she was mad at Dad for some argument I knew nothing about.  Once when I had stomach flu and just leaned over the side of my bed and threw up on the floor, she said with some exasperation as she cleaned it up, "Couldn't you get to the bathroom?"  That's it.  Those are the only times I can remember her being less than cheerful.  She quite simply had an authentically sunny personality and loving nature.  And because she was all I knew of motherhood, I assumed she wasn't anything special, so took her for granted for a long, long time.

I'm so grateful that she lived long enough for me to grow up enough to finally appreciate her, to help her with chores and cooking when I visited her and Pop, and to treat them both like royalty when they visited me.  To call and send cards and flowers.  To thank her for my life and for the many gifts she gave.  I'm glad she lived long enough to see me married to Sweet Hubby; I know my checkered history with men was hard on her, seeing my heart broken time after time.  I'm glad we had her for as long as we did.  But it wasn't long enough.  Not nearly.

Let's Talk About Slavery

Who was the first human to think "I will own this person and whip him until he works for me for free"?  Does slavery go back to our most primitive selves?  To before language, even?  No animals I've ever heard of keep slaves.  It seems that slavery, as disgusting and perverted and wrong as it is, is wholly a human invention.  Go us.

Is it fear that gives us this driving, pulsating need to dominate?  We are, after all, naked apes in a world in which all but a very few animals, including some so small we can't even see them, can kill us.  Even a great number of plants can do us in.  We do not have claws or speed or rapid multiple reproduction or natural camouflage.  What we have are our minds.  They are our only natural  weapons.  One of the ways we use them to keep us safe, of course, is to manufacture weapons.  The other is to lie and deceive.  Animals cannot lie to each other; they are too sensitive to subtle chemical signals.  (Our little girl cat used to know when her brother was going to vomit five minutes before he actually did, before he even moved a muscle.)

Lying, like slavery, is a human invention.  It's one way we can win, by convincing other people to believe something that is not true.  An awful lot of people had to approve in order for slavery to exist and be tolerated.  Somehow the slavers managed to win that argument for a long, long time.  The argument has now, finally, been lost both officially and globally, but slavery has not disappeared.  It continues to be tolerated, both underground and in the open, in various sinister forms.  Think, for example, of sex trafficking.  There have to be those who sell, and there also have to be those who buy.

We humans have to hold power in order to survive.  What could be a more thrilling avenue to a feeling of power than by forcing someone to be your slave?  Still, it seems to me one would have to kill off a big part of one's humanness to do so.

Albert Schweitzer said "Nothing human is foreign to me."  I think that's a pretty good philosophy, to remember that whatever one human does, any of us could do, even if only in extreme circumstances.  I "own" pets, so I guess I have had a least a taste of what it is to have power over another being (although they are cats and I could never get them to do my bidding now matter what measures I tried).  But I have never found, perhaps don't want to find, that part of my humanness which could be a slave owner or Nazi.  So I get it, and I also don't get it at all. 

Who is it really?

I recently learned to Floss (the swaying dance, not the teeth care activity), something that came quite easily to me, which I understand is not true for everybody.  I boasted about this accomplishment to a group of colleagues who range from my age to late teens/early 20's (I've never thought to ask for specifics).  I was told that the Floss is dead.  My accomplishment is a hollow victory.  Once again, I became trendy late enough to be hilarious.  It got me wondering: Who decides these things?

I read Malcolm Gladwell's wonderful Tipping Point, so I know the mechanism of how ideas/trends/styles, etc. are spread.  But who starts a trend, I wonder.

Perhaps some adorbs (see how up to date?!) six-year-old tot was caught doing that silly dance on camera by his grandma, who posted it to some social media site, it was passed along, and Bingo!  A new sensation.  The latest phenomenon.  The current trend.  The trendy current.

Mr. Gladwell's book antedates Facebook.  He couldn't study what social media does to our tastes, our interests, our communication, our politics, our addictions.  (Perhaps he has by now, and if he has, I want a copy of that book.)  I'm guessing that the conveyance of culture is not what it was and never will be again, thanks to social media.  Masses of people now spend hours of their lives sharing their opinions, photos of their pets and their dinners, their theories, their plans, their insecurities.  Mostly their opinions.  Well, not fair to say "their" opinions, because here I am sharing mine.  But the mitigating factors are that I do this about once a week instead of eight times an hour, and I'm probably doing it into the wind and I don't know if a blog is considered social media.  Still, ya got me.

I know this is the world as it is now, and no reason either to fight it nor mourn.  It's just a cruel fact of this era that I can hear about a trendy dance, see it a few times, learn to do it, and then find out that it makes me terribly dated and dismissable.  Oh well, it wasn't all that important.  I had fun Flossing, and still do when I'm at home and dancing my ass off.  I've never once been trendy before, so why would I think I could be now?