THE CRISIS OF CONTEXT ( A serious reflection)

I have a friend, well, an acquaintance, that I met years ago on an airplane. We both write. We are in many ways different, many ways similar. We are people of Christian faith, we are parents of children we love, and if I have followed his Facebook postings accurately, we each love the person with whom we share life; it’s even possible that we are registered to the same political party. Perhaps there, our similarities end. I am likely quite liberal and he, if I read rightly, matches the weight of my convictions on the conservative scale. I could be wrong. He is likely to let me know.

I recently posted a political cartoon on Facebook. An apparently kind, white policeman sits on a counter stool next to a small black girl. 

He asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

She responds, “Alive.”

I also posted a photo of a massive police officer on the ground pounding on a 14-year-old black boy accused of stealing tobacco. Troubling, both.

My acquaintance, a published storyteller, messaged me: 

“you have been successfully programed by CNN. you myopically focus on the bad, while seldom seeing and celebrating the good. instead, I urge you to focus on the good instead of inflaming.”

 He’s wrong, of course, thought I. He knows neither my habits of “seldom” or of “celebrating.” He next accused me of neglecting context. However, he did urge focus; so that’s what I did. I focused on my mother, and how she was shaped by the context of her childhood. Specifically, the context of her father’s influence. Context is important to my critic, my fellow writer, but context is frequently what we choose not, or cannot, see unless we are in it.  And, the context of being black in white-parented American history matters presently; and few of us who are white are “in” it.

~  ~

My maternal grandfather, Pop, was self-educated, a genius worker with metal, a man who wore well-creased Kahiki work-clothes, kept his shoes polished, his beautiful silver hair brushed, kept a candy drawer in the chest next to “his chair” in the living room, listened to news on “his radio,” and ate an apple a day, peeled with “his” pocketknife. I often watched the peel fall, one continuous curl, onto newspaper placed on the floor. Pop was fastidious, calculatedly autocratic. He hated blacks. He didn’t call them that. He kept his gun loaded and at hand, and his membership current in the Ku Klux Klan. He once beat a puppy to near death to punish a child forced to watch, cheated on his wife, and sexually, emotionally, and verbally molested both his wife and his daughter—my mom. 

By the time I knew her well, my mom was fashionable, a successful businesswoman, a winner of air-races, my good friend, possessor of a great sense of humor, a perfect partner to my father, suspicious of very nearly every man she didn’t know well, and plagued by hatred of the father she wished she could have loved.  

If there is one thing I do understand about sustained but not-always-noticed-by-those-not-in-the-context-of-abuse, it is this: At some point, it is enough. At some point, a reaction occurs. At some point, abuse affects people and there is protest and protest can be well-tempered or furious.

In the opinion of my acquaintance, I may be “myopic” as I focus on the history of America’s treatment of its black population, but  I’m not sure how to focus on the good (my grandfather was a proficient shot . . . that was good) when the subject is about bad behavior and consequences. 

This was good: My mom was talented. My mom was considerate. My mom made money. My mom had great fashion-sense, and a slew of good friends.  My mom had one fine marriage, two decent children, and some very happy poodles along the way. Why not just focus on that?

“you have been successfully programed by CNN. you myopically focus on the bad, while seldom seeing and celebrating the good. 

instead, I urge you to focus on the good instead of inflaming.”

Yeah. Why not. 

Alice