I have been faced with a lot of disappointment this semester (a good deal in myself), and so if I can't muster proactive, I will at least strive for reflective.
I come from a low-income, Hispanic community and when I was young, I had a lot of proactive zeal... but I have become conditioned by disappointment over the years. It runs in the family. I am a lot like my father and my mother's mother. They are, in my opinion, wonderful people, but it's not hard to see that they have broken spirits. The first problem is their intellect coupled with the fact that they read. They recognize the profusion of greed, corruption, and ignorance in the world, but they feel powerless to stop it. My grandmother was supposed to have dinner with JFK the day he was shot. I don't know if she ever recovered from that one. Even as popular as my grandfather was in the Democratic party, could the meaningful work he did really do enough? If his star had continued to rise, could he have ended up dead, too? As a politician's wife in the South in the 1960s, these were the questions running through her head.
My father tends to credit his Norwegian half for his stoicism. His mother was a widow with eight children (my other grandfather was also a popular lawyer/judge in the Pennsylvania, but died of a heart attack before getting to see a fellow Catholic elected president). With her husband gone, she moved the kids to the Great Plains and taught music education at the college level. I learned from my father, as he learned from his mother, that if nothing else, sigh and continue on. Wake up, go to work, pay the bills, read the paper, numb yourself. My mother would add: crawl into bed and sleep for ten hours. It's hard to break a cycle when it is so deeply embedded into your natured and nurtured muscle memory.
I understand the adage, "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade," but in reality (and oddly enough) I prefer to pour salt on my lemon wedges and suck them dry. Am I what I eat? Salty and bitter?
To clarify, when I mention the community in which I was raised, I mean to say, there was a lot of heartbreak...
ReplyDelete1) The small stuff: I once made a bunch of "spirit" posters to put up around school for the marching band before competition. I bought the materials myself and spent hours at home working on them... within an hour of hanging them around school, the were tagged and slurred.
2) The big stuff: My best friend from elementary school made new friends when we got to middle school... and by that, I mean, she became affiliated with the Latin Kings, started drinking and doing drugs (not just smoking some weed), got pregnant (aborted? miscarried?), was thrown out of her house, and of course, dropped out of high school our first year. I never stopped being her friend, I was just powerless to stop her. I was an Honors kid, a cheerleader, in band, and a member of student council... so being a "good role model" or positive peer influence obviously meant nothing. In fact, she made the volley ball and softball team freshman year, but those activities didn't make much of a difference either. Though I can't blame it all on Andi... her dad was a mean drunk. My single father raised me. Maybe there's something to that.