CoEternity

(This is a letter to Cynthia Tucker, of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, concerning community reaction to a random shooting in an Atlanta neighborhood versus the animal abuse by Michael Vick revealed at that time in 2008. She asked to publish it, but it didn't make it into the paper.)

Wade, may we print your response?

<cynthia@ajc.com>

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 From      Wade Benson                       

 Subject   Appropriate rage                                       

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Message:

Dear Ms. Tucker:

You are right to point up our skewed continuum of rage. The long stretch
from indifference to active negligence passes through disappointment,
righteous indignation and base voyeurism. In Annaijh's case, malign
resignation is probably the best description of our reaction: I'm powerless
against random murders in neighborhoods where brainless violence is to be
expected. I ruminate briefly and change the channel.
 
But the Vick case requires no soul-searching from me. The spectacle is
invigorating and calls forth my justified disgust: look at what the rich
man and his crew did; look how stupid they were to not only abuse innocent
creatures but to squander their own prosperity through arrogance. (Can you
say "uppity"?) This case is tried in our minds, and the guilty are already
paying a heavy price. No worry for me.
 
Drive-by, gang related idiocy, though, is not so easy to tie up in a bundle
of justice. We need to do something, but who knows what? For one thing, we
need more help for Annaijh's hometown.
 
This city needs to purge its own malign resignation. Neighborhood after
neighborhood in Atlanta is under-policed. The number of officers per square
mile or per capita is, truly, criminally low. We need officers on foot in
high density areas, and we need multiple drives through tough areas by a
steady stream of enforcement every day. We also need a sense of respectful
accessibility between the protectors and the protected.
 
It's not just that more cops will physically apprehend more law-breakers,
it's that our community care will be demonstrated by the extra attention,
and crime will, experience shows, go down. That sort of permanent "surge"
in community action would be one way to memorialize little girls who die
only because of where they are unlucky enough to be born, and it might just
save some future innocents.
 
Thanks for your good work,
Wade Benson

 
(I also was less than moved by [then-West Virginia Senator] Byrd's podium rage; Democrats really can do
better for a spokesman on a black athlete's malfeasance than to allow a
former Klansman to touch the subject.)
 

Ask a twenty-something about marriage and family these days, and you’ll likely get an explanation of why the two don’t require each other: marriage is  completely optional, and having kids is kind of unrelated. Everything is a roll of the dice, anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Here in the US, the number of couples living together out of wedlock has grown from 500,000 in 1970 to more than 5 million today. For the first time, a majority of households are headed by unmarried or single adults, according to recent census data. So, we have a redefinition of family that has been formulated outside the legal and religious standards that brought us into the last century with rules much the same as in the previous 30 generations.

“Unmarried mothers gave birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States in 2007, a share that is increasing rapidly both here and abroad…” NY Times, May 13, 2009

So it isn’t simply a heathen thing, an American thing or a white, black or Hispanic thing. Iceland has over 60% births to unmarried women. (It is clearly not, however, in any way an Asian thing: Korea has less than 2% out of wedlock; Japan less than 3%.) Yet here we are, only 70 years after the rate of “illegitimate births” in the US was at 3.8%. Sure, there were tons of shotgun weddings in those days, but everyone knew that you got hitched when you knocked her up.

What has given us this 1000% increase, even as cheap, effective, female-centered birth control became the norm fifty years ago?

Those of us who came into adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s would likely have assumed that there would be a big jump in numbers of people who stay single. But even we are surprised at the size of this spike. Though we would have reasoned that lots of our contemporaries wanted to keep changing partners and doing user-friendly, non-violent drugs and raising children to do the same, we wouldn’t have imagined that religious tradition and social expectation would so easily roll over.

I’m thinking this phenomenon is less the collapse of a former society than it is a quick-time, evolutionary adaptation to reality. Children of divorce are unalterably scarred and so, reasonably, they get to be suspicious of breakable marriage contracts and their aftermath. Still, I have been surprised that they are willing to institutionalize uncertainty. At least, I have reasoned, if you stand up with a some witnesses and a preacher or a judge, you have a few more people pulling for you, cheering on your chances as a couple for life.

[Oh, I almost forgot. Full disclosure: I married and divorced the same woman twice. In at age 19, out, finally, at age 42.  I am happily married now to a woman upon whom the ironies of my connubial elasticity are not lost. So, this writing is nobody’s lecture.]

The willing extension of the family that is marriage, that contract of availability, was clearly designed to have value to the children. There was a formal line of shared responsibility including all relatives, assumed to offer more safety for the child. If someone gets sick or goes broke there is actual help available, almost legally required. But those who float freely without a marriage certificate today, bouncing a baby on each knee, would argue that they have that level of security anyway, without the tenuous lines of connection. Besides, who wants to formalize the web of relationships among dad and his three ex-wives, mom’s latest boyfriend who beats her less often than the last guy, four grandpas who think you’ve lost your mind and three grandmas who weep for your lost soul? Better to stay close to your mom or your sister and let them help you with the baby and order that pizza delivery for you. People of child-rearing age now were, in their crucial growing-up years, subjected to an avalanche of crumbled expectations and moral disenchantment with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and popular heroes alike.

So, when that same group of relatives and fallen icons attempts to offer advice or presumes to cluck tongues to shame the pregnant, unmarried woman, it seems quite reasonable that her eyes would glaze over. In her mind, she has, at the very least, an equal chance at a decent life for her and for her child by making a private deal with the man in her life. Or going it alone. And, by deciding to have the child, she makes a commitment to someone, that little person beholden only to her, who may actually appreciate her and see her as a person important enough to respect forever.

Evidence suggests that, for many a young woman in 2011, these are dice she’s willing to roll, even if such gambling is still illegal and shamed in many parts of her world.

And two people living together? Even more clearly None of My Business, it turns out.

I had not been, initially, amused with the arrival of my 60th birthday and its implications of impending dependency and slowed response that await those who make it this far in life. Ever since my father retired at age 62, I've had this milestone in mind, imagining the elderly certification that is represented by the arrival of the seventh decade of life on this Earth, in this country in this century.

So what. Big deal. I turned 60 yesterday.

Here is what I want the next decade to bring:

• More exploration of my creative capacity, whether in performance or writing
• More grandchildren from my completely adult, competent children and their spouses
• More opportunities for celebration of my place next to my gifted, clever, funny and very young wife
• More success in the work world as I accept the role of wiser, if somewhat wiseass, old man
• More clarity about the ultimate value of existence through pursuit of all of the above

Having been doused with tons of good humor and attention yesterday from friends and family, I feel the benefit of that collective energy, and I am reminded that this energy is there for the tapping every day of my life. It would be my loss, and my shallow stupidity, to ignore this manifest gift through self-reverence, self-centeredness or laziness of spirit. 

To my friends and family who've made the positive case for my attentive presence in their lives, I pledge to be here, to push forward, to listen , to actively respond and physically participate as requested or as desired by each of you and all of us. 

For a minimum of another ten years, that is.  I'll get back to you in 2020 about the plan for decade number 8. 

What we now consider criminal, sexual attacks upon the young of both sexes by older, predatory persons have always been with us. In some cultures, the handing off of young girls to old men is institutionalized and sanctified. In dominant Western tendencies, such violations have been variously ignored and denied across all social strata and traditions for all time. Women in my life are quick to point out that the soul-less assaults by men upon girls are under-reported because the act is so close to normal: girls of 13 are marriageable in Massachusetts with the approval of parents and judge, after all. God help the girl who is both trusting and physically precocious if she smiles one time too many at the handsome youth minister with whom she is smitten.

The current rage aroused by the system of hiding the sex sins of Catholic priests points up our habitual denial, and it begs for a hard look at its root cause:  Professed celibacy as a guarantor of strength and "purity."

All manner of men across history have developed rites of passage and hierarchies among acceptable members as a way of manufacturing, out of whole cloth, social order which pushes power up to the inventors of such systems. A defining difference among these structures of created power is the degree to which the powers of available gods are brought to bear in the make-believe world. Even though the Bible offers scant support for denying one's physical requirement to reproduce a next generation, celibacy was inserted into the Catholic ministry early as proof of they moral superiority of those who keep their robes closed. More borrowed from other spiritual cults than invented by the Church's founders, celibacy made mothers proud of their sons while providing a manifestly odd sample of male and female humanity in the life of service to God.

Women have often told me that a celibate life does not seem that strange to them, and that, minus the urge for children, giving up sex would be, in some ways, a relief. Men, on the other hand, are always suspicious of the claim of celibacy by their fellow men. Entire camps of men-only dwellings? To whom would such places be attractive? Idealistic boys who have yet to feel the urges of what they are missing? Wily, sexually advanced boys who seek a wall of safety behind which to live out their urges? Patient boys who wait until they are men before pulling starry-eyed believers under their predatory spell?

No disclaimer is required, but I state here my conviction that a majority of men and women who serve in the Catholic Church do so with a heart of surrender and a gift for service. But they could as easily express themselves and spread their value if they were married with children or openly gay, held both in high esteem and held in check by a familial system that did not mix work structure with the need for emotional, spiritual support. The tradition that denies sexual reality has ill-served the Church, and we must assume that this fact is not new to the world in the last century.

Lying--and hiding--about sexuality, is rife within all brands of Christianity, and misapplication of sexual attention plagues humanity at large (see female genital mutilation, foot-binding  and child sex slavery.) This case of a fully exposed, endemic failure, however, offers a once-in-two-millennia opportunity to stop denying the absurdity of phony sexual isolation. We believe our God is forgiving for good reason: we make lots of sick and hurtful mistakes. The least we can do is shorten His list of absolutions required by coming clean on impractical, enforced closeting of powerful forces within the beings we are designed to be.

A recent column by Roger Cohen in the Times brought up again the idea of how, why and whether the United States is uniquely deserving of respect for its use of advantage and power, as compared to other dominant nations/ states of history.

Many begin such considerations by referencing personal experience, making either an affirmative or negative argument. Comparing the US to other nations, however, in terms of prejudice, class and arrogance is just fine as long as individual anecdotes acknowledge historical distinctions.

The U.S. was the inheritor of a few good Enlightenment traits and a whole bunch of rotten, exploitative assumptions, slavery being the main soul-killing bequest.

For some 400 years the American continents were, effectively, European satellite states, subject to the rape of all their resources and their inhabitants for the benefit of white ruling classes back home in Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, France...In only 9 decades from the founding of this country, our bloody catharsis over slavery had passed. The inherited evil could not survive because the U.S. constitution was precisely the "house divided" to which Lincoln alluded; the elements of prevailing justice contained therein made the Civil War inevitable.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Europe had outlawed slavery. Who needs that messy institution when you have a pristine class system in place where the poor and ignorant know how lucky they are to serve the well-born? America's battle for equality continues haltingly, but we have ultimately achieved a level of inclusiveness still unimaginable in most of the world. (Loving Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong in Paris while hating Algerians is part of a still-repeating pattern of European disingenuousness in race relations.)

And, even in the midst of two ugly wars, we in the West are woefully ignorant of the cultures of class and ethnic superiority fielded by traditional Asian societies.

The fact that the United States succeeded in establishing a nation with neither a king nor a state religion made it an incredibly forward model that Europe only slipped into after two world wars and, for some, one Cold War. 

Yes, America has an arrogance in place of a turmoil-generated resentment common to cultures pushed around for centuries by European entitlement and exploitation. It's a habit of denial that keeps us thinking we can do anything, even as that thing (insert your least-favorite intervention here) is sometimes very wrong. But the arrogant pieces of American culture are nowhere to be found in the constitution--except for that free speech part. Capitalism is a tradition-based institution--also inherited--which is sometimes disconcertingly raised to divine status; two-party politics is the result of habits and alliances that have worked for those who play, but which may someday evolve into a different form; religious power in politics is mercurial in both its intensity and effectiveness, depending upon the last scandal involving a churchman.

And all the bloviating on this subject which resurfaces regularly, including my own, is a direct result of the infectious, constitutionally guaranteed right to speak which has also just recently made its way to perhaps 40% of the world. We had it from the start, and none of our own would-be silencers has finally had his way.

So, yes, the U.S. is different, and mostly better as a leader toward smashing stratification and division, if only because we are arrogant enough to believe in our dreamy concept of never-ending possibility to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity..."