March 14, 2006

March 14, 2006

The Sky Is Gray

...and the wind is pink.

You may have heard these words in an Ernest Gaines short story dramatized on a PBS special. In the book there is a pivotal character who makes the statement that the sky is gray and the wind is pink. A young black man in the south in the turbulent fifties questions the reality around him. He reads the constitution and its words are meaningless. He sees justice in the form of lynchings and he sees equality in the form of poorly maintained facilities for African Americans. He causes quite a stir one day when he announces that the sky is gray and the wind is pink, but he explains that he can no longer take anyone else's words over his own experience since he has learned that other people don't mean the words they use.

I remember reading about the history of america and thinking of all the atrocities of the past as something I was so lucky to have not experienced. The trail of tears, Jim Crow, Japanese interment camps, all the way back to the puritanical 'rule of thumb'. (If you didn't know, the original rule of thumb was a law that a man was allowed to beat his wife with anything thinner in circumference then his thumb.) I thought as a child that we had finally entered into a modern day system of equality, luckily just as i was being born in 1974.

But now i am not so sure. James byrd in Texas, Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima in New York, Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. As much press as these cases have received, what we have yet to realize is that we live in a country that is hostile towards women, homosexuals, Muslims, immigrants, blacks, Latinos, etc. We are living with this hostility around us everyday. I watch women get called bitches and fear for their safety, because they reject lewd sexual advances. I watch gay men and women get persecuted by people who have truly perverse sexual fetishes for humiliation and sadism that just happen to be mainstream. I watch Muslims get harrassed in airports. It just goes on and on. I can no longer think that the world USED to have institutionalized hatred and discrimination.

I am beginning to think the wind is still quite pink.

I am not ranting because I know that I help play my part in maintaining the status quo. I have allowed the value system that maintains hate to seep into my psyche. It's a peculiar country, America. You are free to do anything you want, but yet everybody is supposed to want the same thing...the American dream...its kind of like Henry Ford and his model T...you could have any color you wanted so long as it was black.

And what is that dream anyway? It's not just to have a house and 2.3 kids and a dog...it is to do all this stuff and somehow be better then everyone else...to be special in all the mediocrity and unoriginality which is the traditional American value system. Almost all of us get caught up somewhere trying to prove at least to ourselves that somehow we are better than all these other schmucks grabbing at the same straws as us. "I am noble...I am not like these other poor slobs"...or at least that is what we think. If America has a characteristic sin, I would have to say its vanity...hands down. We are all just like Narcissus trying to gaze upon our own beauty and specialness and trying our best to ignore, if not destroy anything that threatens that perspective. We all want to be the fairest in the land...but the only way to achieve that is to succumb to everyone else's idea of what makes one fair, and that first requires us to enforce that everyone share the same value system in the first place. 270 million people playing and only one guy can win and he is probably not even enjoying it, because he's to busy trying to stay on top of the heap.

Even if you win the rat race...you are still a rat.

-dred