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We are Getting There

Our TV is on:
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The Minnesota Lynx are playing
the Washington Mystics.
The score isn't important.

It is real basketball.

When I began teaching in college,
already middle aged, with four children,
the girls in Iowa high schools
played . . . oh, I don't know what it was.
I think there were six players on a team.
They were allowed to dribble the ball.  Once.
Then they had to pass it.
There were three offensive players
at one end of the court,
and three defensive players at the other.
The stats showed that there were
some really high-scoring forwards,
and defensive players with no points.

There was a flap at the local high school
because one of the female students
wore blue jeans to school.  She said
it was winter, and she was cold:  Nope!
Girls wear skirts, and boys wear
whatever they wanted to wear, unless--
never tested, so far as I know--
they chose to wear skirts.

When I moved from Berkeley, California
to Fremont--25 or 30 miles south--
there were two non-white families in town:
Asians, both doctors, as I recall.
That was in 1958.

Our present political situation aside--
shall we call it "a political situation",
or an unholy mess?--we have made a lot
of progress in my own lifetime.

We still gerrymander political districts
to make them undemocratic; sometimes
for ideological, for racist, for religious,
reasons of economic and social class.

But we are fighting a very good fight.
Most of us don't care, any more, whether
you are a Catholic of a Baptist or a Muslim.
Most of us have multi-racial relatives,
and if we don't, we wonder why not.

Our major problems are not really
differences of race and religion and tribe.
They are the unanalyzed consequences
of an economy that is transiting from
an old industrial society to one based on
information, and science, on a global scale.

And because we have not thought it through,
not adjusted what our government should do
to deal with this global economic community,
have not figured out how to help each other
when the earth is shifting beneath our feet,
we lash out at each other in anger,
elect loud and assertive manipulators of
our insecurity and anger, and pretend
that what we used to be is what we should
try to become again.

But the Lynx do not look at all like
the six-girl basketball players in Iowa, in 1969.
They are really good, and are demonstrating
what everybody in Iowa said was wrong:
that girls really cannot run full court,
and dribble the ball more than once.

I suppose some of those fragile, skirt-wearing
girls grew up and married Catholics, or Asians,
or maybe even other girls.  Wore blue jeans.
Used blue language, sometimes, right out loud.

We are getting there.


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