You may have to click on this photo (which will enlarge it) to read the bumper sticker on this auto festooned with messages: Why Be Normal? I spotted this on the way to a play this morning. The venue is a former mortuary on the southern end of Valencia Street, an area that once was San Francisco's Mortuary Row. Once real estate values in this part of town forced the business of death southward, to Colma, which boasts that it has "more dead residents than live ones," these elegant buildings were transformed into environments supporting the living.In this case, a school, a very special school where progressive education is practiced on behalf of a diverse collection of children of all colors, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities in this, the North American city with a lower proportion of children than any other.
Parents might be forgiven for feeling rather isolated here among a population that, despite its progressive politics, often seems strangely indifferent to those who will inherit the mess this greediest of all societies is leaving behind.
How much carbon did you consume today?
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Lest anyone misinterpret me, I consider myself among the worst offenders. After all, I commute some 90 minutes a day, up and down a dirty highway that keeps getting dirtier. I happen to drive a small, high-mileage vehicle, but it still burns fossil fuels -- a foolish luxury my grandchildren certainly will not experience.
All around me in my commutes are monstrously huge SUVs, including the almost comical (if they were not so sad) civilian military vehicles called Hummers. I'm not a violent man, but I admit to a fantasy of buying an anti-tank weapon and blowing the next Hummer I see out of existence...call it an eco-warrior fantasy.
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Meanwhile, back at the play at the school, my little 8-year-old was a dinosaur. Don't ask me to explain the plot; I can't. But in this photo, she is holding her tail. She was terrific in her role (it turns out dinosaurs can talk), but if course since I am her father, you'd have to ask somebody else.
So, why don't you ask my friend Josh, who was there, His daughter, Paloma, was a wooly mammoth. It turns out that they, too, can talk; in fact, they speak English! In my opinion, Paloma played a great wooly mammoth, and since I am not her father, you can take my word on that.
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As the day progressed, a nasty looking sky moved in on the Bay Area, threatening rain. Late this afternoon, I stood out in our backyard, counting the raindrops descending one by one onto my face. There were so few, you could have counted them on your fingers and toes.
Have you ever noticed how, when the air grows heavy just before a rain, the plants start emitting their sweet odors, the birds scream their warning songs, and your own blood pressure spikes? I'm figuring we are all biologically hooked into the barometric pressure; thus these moments.
Today, I nestled up to the wild roses, the jasmine, and the rosemary in my background, soaking up their musk. I breathed deeply, and thanked whatever spirit brings us these situations that I have reached an age where such tiny matters mesmerize me.
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One thing about my little dinosaur, she has reached the age where "normal" starts to exert its inevitable influence. From time to time, she talks about herself in ways that did not come from home. She is getting fully socialized, albeit in a compassionate, humanistic environment that, when it comes to schools, is, in my experience, pretty much as good as it gets.
No child of mine, I hope, feels any pressure to be "normal." In my view, "normal" means being nothing more than a "good German" in the 1930s. Then, the threat was Adolph Hitler.
Now, the threat is global warming, the end of the world. This is a far more complex threat than the singular evil of Nazism. But the response required is familiar: Stand up, speak out, don't roll over in the face of destruction.
We are entering an era where there is no place for the weak or the meek, and it is doubtful they would want to inherit a ruined planet, even if they could.
Nope, we need activists, strong people who stand up, speak out, and take a stand.
Rather like my little talking dinosaur. Nobody pushes her around, and I love that about her.
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1 comment:
David, the question of normal is one that, at times tortures me, at times perhaps tortures many of us. I say tortures, but may be that is too harsh, but I find it certainly won't got away.
I think much of the difficulty is that being normal has been hijacked by various forces and directed towards being something like a consumer, or a source of little trouble but much opportunity, or a productive citizen. An atom in a molecule that can only be used to form products, only be part of a world bound by patterns, not love.
The thing is, I want to be normal in a sense and anything but normal in another sense. I just want to be free, as I suspect and hope others do.
Sometimes we need to belong and move with many others, and sometimes we need to stand against the flow, and not be pushed around because of who we are, or just because we are different enough in our own human uniqueness to have a key to show what might be to those who have forgotten what lies in a different current.
This is not to criticise your comments, which I much agree with, but perhaps to extend them. To my mind it is the polarisation between normality and abnormality, as much as the qualities themselves that hurts.
I agree that there is something beautiful in a soul like your daughter having the determination to be herself, and I also feel she, you, I and all of us should have the determination and the freedom to glide when we need to, and fight when we must.
I don't want normality to be a process of just lying down and becoming a link in the chain that binds us, but conversely, I don't want to be more than normal in the sense of dying my hair shocking colours, or accosting people with wild and hurtful proclamations , or going against everything and every rule, some of which should just be a bit of respect or healthy common sense.
I don't knock those who choose to express themselves through violent hair, I just wound not. I do not knock those who choose a different path or expression of self, but that reaction may just not be me at a time and place. You do not have to be anti anything to have compassion or to speak your heart.
Certainly with time, and age, there are things I no longer feel the need to demonstrate by advertising my difference with others. But there are always things that will not let me stay the same.
I want normality to be an expression of finding balance and some grain of loving truth between the different extremes in life, not a means to hide my head in the sand. Someone took that away from us without offering anything but barbed truths in replacement.
I think there are times when I would like to be a dinosaur too, and gobble up the silliness around, or just growl. I think the world might need some big proud creatures to rock the earth, if only with their jurassic scale hearts :)
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