We, as human beans, are born into a pod of relatives, like peas...in a pod, or the letters in alphabet soup.
Everybody has a Mom and Dad They both had parents, who are your grandparents. Your parents have siblings, who have children. These are your cousins, which you ain't suppose to marry. Excepting in Virginia. They marry cousins "to keep the " Riff Raff" out of the family tree."
You are born to a bunch of people who will give you last name you'll have for the rest of your life...unless you are a girl. She got born with a nice last name, and what happens last name. She decides to let her hormones do some choosing, and guess what? So don't got her last name anymore. What's with that? When she marries is she any less a human with a last name she may like? Does she lose all personal identity? Society, Huh! Rules spoken and unspoken make me nervous! In my Mama's time she wasn't Virginia Lancaster Shields, she was Mrs Wayne R Shields. Come on guys...what's wrong with that picture. Society is painted a huge canvas. Change comes very slowly, or not at all.
The people who you were born to will raise you, or jerk you up, or throw you to the dogs, or put you in the cabbage patch. You don't have a choice. They are yours to keep, like it or not. BUT you do have a few individual choices to make.
The Furry Freak Brothers, (above) put it succinctly. "You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose." I don't suppose that make much sense...but it's the only individual thing you have going for you. Picking your friends and your nose if you like. Your Mama don't like 'dem friends, your Daddy don't like 'em, your siblings are ambivalent to em, but you made the effort to befriend these people...and they are YOUR friends. So, they can kiss my grits. Society and family are a lot alike...nobody likes or trust anybody very much.
When YOU get to be about 35, with a teenagers in the house, you'll look a your teenager and say..."Yeah, I had friends when I was your age, and I was an idiot to spend any time with any of them. How did my parents stand me. Duh! They didn't, they just tolerated you.
Mark Twain said, and I paraphrase. " I left home at 18 and came back again at 21, and was amazed at how much my father had learned."
My prognosis is that God made teenage years to piss off parents enough to throw em out of the house. Most teenagers can't wait to get out... until dirty laundry, paying rent, having no money for anything, finally makes them forget what "parental transgression" made them leave home in the first place. Eventually 'ole Dad ain't all bad and Mom could serve Dog Food...that would be fine.
Now, for the society part. What are we thinking...trying to organize ourselves into a world society when we can't even manage a descent family or small town without being at each others throats. "I'd like to buy the world a coke"? That's is about as far as world brotherhood will ever go... and nobody except Coke and Ted Turner could afford it...and there ain't no money in it.
We, as human beings, are "married" to our social structure of family and friends, race and religion, mores and traditions, etc. It's our opinions that make Southerners different from Mid Westerners, from Yankees, from Californians, from Chinese, from Aborigines and that, my friends, you ain't gonna change. Pie are Square and cornbread am round...and grits is groceries the world around, but only in the South.
I took my Southern self to Vermont one summer for work, and they would BUY me a Coke just to hear me talk. I moved to West Virginia, and was called "the hippie on the hill"...cause my hair was over my ears. I moved to California and they could tell I wasn't from around there by the way I looked. I went to Australia, and the called me "Yank".
Societies don't like to assimilate easily, and mostly not at all. You can live somewhere for 50 years, but you are still not a part of their indigenous society, and never will be. Hell, there are people from Pa. and Conn. that came to Athens, Georgia in the 50's to work at the Westinghouse plant. They still "ain't from around here."
The old Pharaoh of Egypt conquered many countries and tried to assimilate the societies, and 'ole Moses, he said he was gonna' lead the people out of bondage into the wilderness. It was a given they might starve to death, but it was THEIR society, by God, and they were the ones doing the starving, thank you very much! You know the rest of that story. Folks is gonna' have it their way, cause that's THEIR way. Get over it...accept it, and go do something else. You'll never change societies. Modify? yes. Change? no. All my old hippie, war protesting friends of the 60's are consevative, republican, church going members of society wondering what in the HELL the youth of America think they are doing? CAUTION! Society at work.
The God's must be crazy to think that all these societies we have created can be put under one umbrella. People will tolerate each other to a point, but to trying to say we humans are a universal society is like saying King Kong was a monkey. He is, but he sure as hell ain't like any monkey I ever saw. So it is with societies, and will ever be. Accept your Family, your Society...and leave the rest alone...they got the same mess you do to contend with.
Ain't your dog, ain't your chicken. right, Jesslyn?
No comments:
Post a Comment