Skip to main content

More or Less Exactly All Alike

I don't remember when I chose to be born a male.  Maybe I didn't.  Maybe it just happened that way.  It has had consequences, most of which I do not know.

I do know that it has given me some advantages, most of which are completely absurd; shorter lines at the stadium toilets, for instance, and the assumption that I am better at math than females are.  I'm not.

And to be honest, I also do not remember when I chose to be born of Scandinavian descent.  Not just Norwegian, but "a dumb Norwegian".  That didn't seem fair to me.  After all, while I wasn't very good at math, I became pretty good at cod fish.  And I did get through grade school, although not without a temporary expulsion or two.  You know, just trying to make space.

I figured that out, too.  I was dumber than some people, and smarter than others.  It didn't have anything to do with being either male or a Squarehead.  

There are a lot of things like that:  just a continuum.  We find ourselves somewhere on it.

For instance, there is a lot of nonsensical blather these days about marriage being between one man and one woman.  Very often that is so.  It wasn't so for Abraham, or Jacob,  or Joseph Smith, or Charlie Sheen, or even me, for that matter.  This is my second marriage.  Allow me to call it "serial monogamy", and not polygamy.

I will admit, ours is a male/female relationship.  For reasons beyond my ken, I have a hankering for a female partner.  But there are other males who like a male partner, instead.  That is a continuum, too.  It is, undoubtedly, still much more complex than that!  No matter, I find myself where I am.

We have almost learned that whatever skin color we were born with is not a choice:  it just happened, and here we are!  But lots of people think that we choose whether we are attracted to males, or females, or maybe both; maybe over time.  I never chose to be--I shall be modest, again--"attracted" to females.  (I did choose not to say, "aroused".)  The urges within that other people have does not change anything about me.

We used to think that a lot of things were a matter of choice that are not.  We tried to talk people out of being depressed.  We had experts who charged us a lot of money to provide talk therapy.  It worked, a little, probably because a lot of talking can have some small effect on our chemistry.  Pills work better.  If the real problem is that we were born with a chemical imbalance, it is much better to change the chemistry than to talk someone out of being bipolar.

Marriage isn't just between one man and one woman.  It isn't even always just between the same two people, forever and ever, world-without-end-amen!  What you choose, there in Indiana or Istanbul, has very little to do with me and my house.  Fortunately.

Skin color, race, gender, intelligence, height, vocal range, and even common sense all fall somewhere in a  spectrum; along a continuum.
"I see by your utfit dat you vass a skvrehead!" Yep! "A dumb Norwegian!" You can see me there, in that spectrum, just a little off-center. Except in math.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more