Tag Archives: culture

Acclimated

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“Bring your coat; it’s cold out!”

I was reminded recently of the last time I visited Arizona. It was 1982. I was attending college1 in southwest Washington. My mom, who had remarried a couple years before, was living in Phoenix with my stepdad and the older of my sisters2.

My sister was getting married3 on Christmas Eve, so I came to visit for Christmas break to attend the wedding and have Christmas with Mom.

Every time we left the house, Mom would urge me to bring my coat. And everywhere I went, I wound up carrying my coat draped over one arm. I regretted not packing several pairs of shorts. The temperature, as I recall, never dropped below the low 60s (Farenheit)4. My Mom and Step-dad weren’t the only people wearing coats at the restaurants, movie theaters, and so on. I was sweating, but surrounded by an entire city of people practically shivering from the “cold.”

December in Phoenix, at least that year, was like June in Seattle.

On the other hand, I start complaining about the heat when the temperature gets up into the high 70s—and whining by the upper 80s—which makes friends who live in Phoenix (and Texas, southern California, Florida, et cetera) laugh5. Since for only two or three weeks in August or July does Seattle temperatures get into what most people would classify as summer-ish, my tolerance for heat is nearly non-existent.

Mom’s acclimation to Phoenix winter was particularly amusing to me, because during my childhood we lived in much, much colder places. During my junior high years, for instance, one of my morning chores during winter months was to carry an extension cord out to the driveway and plug-in the engine block heater for Mom’s car. It was actually two heaters: one built into the oil pan, the other into the coolant system. It warmed up the engine block enough to make the car start easily in the cold. On those mornings where the thermometer out on our front porch showed the temperature was colder that -10°F (-23°C), I had to string the second extension cord out to plug in the engine block heater for Dad’s pickup.

It got cold enough to justify the second extension cord at least a couple dozen times each winter.

Some years ago when on Christmas Eve I called my grandmother who still lives in that small Colorado town, she told me it hadn’t been a terribly cold Christmas thus far. “We only got to 25-below6 once or twice this week!”7

And one of my cousins who was there chimed in that the windchill factor was only “minus fifteen.”

Mom lived in that part of the country for a good 18 years, yet only a year or so in Phoenix was all it took for her to start thinking that what I considered early summer weather required a coat. Not a jacket, but a coat!

People are adaptable. We get used to the environment we’re in (physical, emotional, or cultural), adjusting our comfort levels without concious thought. Adaptability is a good thing. It doesn’t hurt, every now and then, to try to step outside yourself and look at what you’ve learned to accept as normal. In the abstract, are those really good things? Is this really where you want to be? Are you really who you want to be?

Similarly, are the people you disagree with just looking at things from a different perspective? Just because I think it’s madness to wear a coat when the temperature is in the upper 60s doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Not in the way they would be if they were huddled under an umbrella complaining about getting wet when the sun is shining and the precipitation is zero.

It’s important to distinguish between the way a person reacts to facts and the facts themselves.

1. During the long stretch of attending part-time, while living with my grandparents and working several jobs.

2. Our younger half-sister was living with my dad and stepmother back in Utah.

3. Which is a story so convoluted that if I used it in the plot of a novel, critics would universally pan the book as being totally unbelievable.

4. I have been known to be out and about wearing shorts when the temperature is 50°F (10°C)—and sometimes colder.

5. Of course, the last time I was in Texas in the summer, I noticed how many people spent those hot, muggy months inside their homes air-conditioned down to the lower 70s, riding in air-conditioned cars to sit in restaurants or churches air-conditioned down to the upper 60s, so I’m not sure they have as much to laugh about as they think.

6. That’s -25°F, or -30°C.

7. Just today my half-sister, who lives nearby, commented that the high temperature this week had been 6°, or -14°C.

Drumming

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I loved those Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies, when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure it was in one of those silly black and white films that I first saw the jungle drums as communication trope. Supposedly all the tribes of the jungle, no matter their culture or language, participated in this form of long distance communication where the pounding of drums could warn the neighboring villages of some disaster, perhaps, or to call the tribes to war.

So when I later first heard a pundit or read an editorial that referred to people advocating an escalation in our military actions in Vietnam as “the drum-beat of war,” I thought of those jungle drums. And it seemed to fit the context of the editorials.

In the movies the drumming was always a bad portent. The drums always signaled something that would menace our heroes. Something savage, unpredictable, and utterly merciless (there was, of course, more than a little racism in this trope).

Since drums had been used in various European armies centuries before any of those Hollywood depictions of Africa came to exist, I’m certain that particular turn of phrase also predates the jungle drum trope. Still, whenever I hear the phrase “the drum-beat of” my imagination conjures up black and white images of people dressed in khaki and pith helmets, fearfully looking this way and that, but only able to see impenetrable leaves and vines.

So, when the leader of one of the groups trying to hide their homophobia and religious supremacism behind an innocuous sounding pro-marriage name starting referring to the shift public opinion has been undergoing regarding gay rights in general as “the drumbeat of gay entitlement” I started laughing. Many of the other haters have picked up the phrase, and when they say it on one of those news show, they get such a serious, worried look on their face. Often exactly the same expression from those old jungle movies that the one person who knew what the drums meant would have while he explained to the rest of the party.

They describe gay people and gay-friendly straight people as being on a crusade to destroy all that is right and good in this world. When they do, they have that wide-eyed look of someone who knows the menace is near, but can’t figure out from where the menace will strike.

There isn’t an evil, menacing army beating those drums and preparing to ambush them. The forces for tolerance and equality are not savage, unpredictable, nor merciless. There is a battle going on, but not that kind. And the people beating the drums aren’t at all like that.

A great example was a police raid on a gay bar in Atlanta three years ago. A SWAT-type team of cops from multiple agencies stormed into the bar without a warrant, made everyone lay face down on the floor, and proceeded to harass, threaten, search, and occasionally assault the customers for about 90 minutes. When the news first broke, city officials said the officers were following a lead in a perfectly legitimate investigation. Some veiled comments about “those kinds of people” were made, and they expected it to go away, just as tens of thousands of such raids have in cities everywhere for years.

They didn’t expect a protest march made up primarily of church ladies. For years people like those cops could count on at least two things to protect their bigotted actions from a serious investigation: virtually none of the men they harassed or assaulted would press charges (for fear of being outed), and families of the men harassed would be so ashamed of their gay children that they would never pressure any politician to look into the matter.

Neither of those things are universally true, any longer. A bunch of those men had parents who were not ashamed of their sons. Some of those parents stood up in their churches to describe the warrantless, unjustified police action. And a bunch of those church members—surprise, surprise—thought that “love your neighbor as you love yourself” didn’t include handcuffing innocent people, shouting at them, and kicking them in the head.

The church lady march was only the beginning. With the unexpected pressure from the community, the city had to conduct a real investigation. No evidence of any crime was ever found. No explanation of a legitimate case in progress was ever given. The review board ruled that two of the officers and some supervisors were provably guilty of misconduct, though the punishments at the time were minor, and to this day the city claims that other than those few “mistakes” nothing was wrong with the raid. Eventually, six of the officers involved in the raid were fired for lying about events in the raid, but the city tried to do it very quietly. A report was reluctantly released under a freedom of information request detailing how a total of 16 officers had lied or destroyed evidence to try to cover up the misconduct.

The drummers aren’t just bleeding hearts from liberal churches. Last year, while marriage equality was being debated in my state’s legislature, one legislator who was known not to be in favor of the bill hosted a townhall-style meeting in her district to let people from the community give her their thoughts. After a couple hours of person after person passionately speaking in favor of same-sex marriage, the surprised legislator said that she knew their had to be voices in the community who felt differently. She looked at a man in a police uniform who had been sitting in the front row, looking angrier and angrier the entire time. “This gentleman, for example, hasn’t said anything.”

The cop reluctantly rose to his feet. He explained that he hadn’t said anything because he hadn’t had time to change out of uniform before coming to the forum, so he didn’t want people to think he was speaking for his department. But if she insisted, well, he just wanted to say that as a father of four sons, he wanted all of his boys, including his gay son, to be able to marry the person they fell in love with.

She never found anyone at the meeting willing to speak against the bill. She eventually voted in favor of it.

Or the pair of grandparents I saw, speaking at a legislative hearing in another state, who said, “We want to dance at the weddings of all of our grandchildren, including our lesbian granddaughter.”

There is a drumbeat out there. But it isn’t calling us to march to war. It isn’t warning you of a slaughter or some other danger.

It’s inviting you to come dance at some weddings.

Too young to remember

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“You’re probably too young to remember…” was a phrase that sometimes I dreaded. Other times it signaled a bit of a history lesson I would find interesting.

I’m not entirely happy with how often I find myself using that line. It’s just a natural consequence of getting older. But that’s the problem. We’re not socialized to be happy about getting older.

I’ve known people who got quite radical and angry when they heard that phrase. “It’s nothing more than an ageist attempt to disempower me for being young!” Which sometimes it can be, but most of the time it is simply a literal statement of fact: you weren’t alive when such and such happened, so you have no personal memories of the event.

I read the phrase this morning on a few news blogs because the man who played the clown host of a morning children’s show that was popular in the 60s and 70s died last night.

I don’t have the excuse of being too young to remember the glory days of his show, but I don’t remember them. It was a show produced and seen only on a Seattle channel, and when I was young enough to be in the target age, I lived far, far away. So I’m just as detached as a bunch of much younger people about this. I can understand, in the abstract, how people feel, but I may never quite get it.

He never completely retired, continuing to make public appearances, raise money for charity, and so on, showing up in his patchwork painted limosine. By random chance earlier this year I nearly attended his final public appearance. I was buying salmon at the wild salmon market at fisherman’s terminal and confused that there was a giant crowd of people, and a bunch were wearing red clown noses. Then, as I was driving home, I passed his limo going the other way.

The memories of some experiences we have sometimes carry far more emotional weight and importance to us years after the fact than we expect them to. And that can be hard to explain to another person. When we describe it, even to us, it sounds silly. So he told some jokes and acted silly on screen. And you watched it every single morning when you were supposed to be getting ready for school. And?

But we all have experiences like that. It might be a family ritual, or a thing we used to do in church, or a favorite food at a chain restaurant.

In the abstract it is no big deal. But the human heart doesn’t live in the abstract.

That agenda thing, again

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(I’m posting so much gay-related stuff because it’s Pride Week, a.k.a. the 43rd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, often considered the beginning of the modern gay/lesbian/bi/queer/transgender rights movement. I’ll get back to my usual observations on more trivial topics next week, promise)

Some years ago I wrote an essay, “What agenda?” in which, among other things, I listed my own agenda, not feeling I could speak for anyone else. I still think that’s a pretty good list of goals. Especially the part about making pie for people. Pie makes just about everything better, after all.

Lately certain people have been reading in public a document which they claim is the actual gay agenda, and it’s pretty horrid stuff. The thing is, the list originated as a joke–a joke on the very sorts of people misinformed enough or paranoid enough (or both) to believe that such a document exists. The original article identifies itself explicitly as satire, though the people quoting it now always leave that part out.

In short, they are lying.

Continue reading That agenda thing, again →

Pop goes the culture

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In childhood most of your cultural experiences are dictated by your family. Particularly when I was a kid, when the typical family had, at most, one TV and one stereo music system. I was lucky enough to have parents who believed in reading and being cheap, so except in those towns we lived in that were too small to have a public library, most of my childhood involved near weekly trips to the local library.

For other things, we had church music, TV, my parents’ record collection, and radio. And most of the towns we lived in were so small there was only one local AM radio station. Which didn’t really matter, because our house, like most of our neighbors’ had the TV and stereo in the same room. So you watch/listened to what Mom or Dad wanted.

Continue reading Pop goes the culture →