My wife is Mexican. Grew up in Guadalajara, Jalisco. She’s also a US citizen, a mother, a brilliant artist, a beautiful woman, and fiercely, an individual. She refuses to be categorized. She has spent a significant portion of her life defying those who would try to make her fit into something with which they are comfortable. She is blessed with, what I consider, a healthy cynical and contrarian nature.
As an extremely beautiful and tomboyish girl growing up in Mexico, she was constantly pushed and prodded to be more ‘girly’, more ‘sexy’, wear makeup, wear skirts and dresses, to display her assets for the world to see. She refused. She actually went out of her way to try to make herself less attractive, she wore unrevealing clothes, no makeup and at one point, had her hair braided into Rasta dreads, then shaved her head altogether. Didn’t work. Everyone was attracted to her, nonetheless.
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As an artist, she continues to defy labeling. While many of her contemporary’s social media identities are filled with ‘brown pride’ or ‘girl power’ references, for her, it all seems too limiting. Being a Latina artist or Latinx? artist or female artist are all too small for her. Because she, as the legendary Avant Garde jazz genius Sun Ra warned against, has not ‘lost her celestial rights’. She is not ‘chained and bound’ to planet earth. She is larger than the tribes wherein the culture dictates that she be placed. She is beyond the pettiness of earthly politics and polemics. She’s not apolitical, she’s post political. Wants no part of inclusion in some aggrieved group or class, or really, any group at all. But she is extremely rare. It takes extraordinary courage, a trait not often found in humans, to stand alone.
It’s not easy to remain an individual today when the dominant institutions seem desperately to want to assign everyone to a tribe, a class, and an ever changing dizzyingly convoluted pecking order of oppressor and oppressed. And people love to follow. We move with the herd. Sometimes in a frenzied stampede. Douglas Murray’s “The Madness of Crowds” references a story published by James Thurber in 1933 about the people in a small town in Ohio in 1913 who were group panicked into a mob of stampeding humanity away from an oncoming flood that wasn’t actually happening from a dam that was rumored to have broken but had not. Rodeo roundup, yeehaw.
I recently watched a video of a man who seemed to be self-appointed and either kidding or just crazy, wearing a yellow vest and standing in front of a store gesturing to entering customers to put their arms up, as if going through the TSA airport search, as he proceeded to pass a lint roller over their torsos before allowing them to pass. He didn’t appear to speak, just a little gesture was all that was needed. A line of people waited patiently to comply. Hilarious? Sure, but more than a little frightening too. Possibly a fake video, but the fact that it is believable is telling. I’m guessing that these were probably some of the same people who were so proudly posting photos on Instagram of themselves getting vaccinated. Demonstrably obedient. People love the safety of groups.
Malcom Gladwell’s slow riot theory expressed as much in his piece in the New Yorker a few years ago. In reference to the increasing incidents of school shootings, he argued the point that they demonstrated a willingness to follow what others had already done, once the tolerance ‘threshold’ had been breached by another. The first to throw a rock through a window during a riot has a threshold of zero. After that, it becomes easier and easier for the rest to follow, eventually freeing not just the completely insane, but even the mildly irritated, to commit hideous acts of violence. Humans, it seems, are mostly mimetic, herdable sheep. People love the comfort of groups.
But I’ve never trusted groups. Any more than three or four people gathered together, I get nervous. People do things in groups that they would never do on their own. Like a group of dudes catcalling the ladies as they walk by or the mobs patrolling on the world wide web. These are, for the most part, cowards who do and say things that aren’t real. A fantasy version of themselves. What they would do, if only they were courageous. In that sense, the mobs don’t really represent people. Because alone, they don’t really have those convictions. Only while swaddled by the mob do they have the fake courage to express those thoughts and therefore, don’t represent truth.
I’m also suspicious of any movement that aims to create groups. Groups, by definition, exclude (it ain’t a ‘group’ unless someone’s not invited, just like junior high, weeeeee!). They divide. Which is where, it seems, some would prefer that we go. To our separate corners to sulk and to sneer and lament our differences. To envy those more successful and to blame others for our lot in life. And to breed distrust of those who are not tribal members. Them, they, but not us.
Where did these movements come from? This country was created, in part, on the idea of individualism, independence, individual liberty over tyranny, tyranny of the ruling class, and tyranny of the mob. But true liberty is not easy to achieve or maintain. Most, it seems, if given the choice, would prefer to be taken care of rather than have liberty. But, for a brief moment, this nation was probably the finest example of a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious mish mash of random immigrant groups coming together to form a nation state in human history. Relatively speaking, the incredibly disparate groups of people in this country, have gotten along remarkably well. This extremely difficult experiment seemed to be inching toward success. An argument could be made that the progress of erasing tribal barriers and creating a place where people from all tribes assembled and almost anyone could flourish had become as close to a reality as had ever been achieved with humans on earth.
But something has stopped that forward progress like a broom handle in the bicycle spokes. A broom handle crafted and honed for over half a century, mostly, in the halls of our educational institutions has thrown the culture over the handlebars. A tribal revival seems to be steering us away from progress. From a place where, when I was a child visiting my grandparents in the deep south, I could play football in the front yard with a young black kid my age and neither of us thought about or cared about how our ancestral history should impact our moment of joy, from a place where for the first time in human history a white majority country elected a black leader, twice. To a place now where my 2-year-old son (who, by the way, is half Mexican and half gringo, seemingly an awkward position to occupy in the oppression hierarchy), might now be taught in a public school that he is unavoidably a racist and oppressor, (at least his white half, I guess), and the black kid who he might otherwise play with, the victim of his oppression. No football in the front yard for those two newly minted ‘enemies’.
Doesn’t sound like progress to me.
Where does that leave us? At each other’s throats, online at least. But who benefits from that movement? An ideology focused on group identity, class assignments and associated victimhood. Who are those motivated to re-create a tribal world, to divide and thus weaken this nation? Why would anyone want to do that? Maybe to create a need for something else. An institution that will take care of all of the fallen tribes. “Trust us all of you aggrieved and oppressed. We’ll take care of you.”
Indeed, putting faith in institutions is risky business at best. The only thing that brings out the worst in humans faster than a tribe, is an institutional tribe.
This seems to be the old wagon rutted broke ass trail that some ‘leaders’ are trying to steer humanity down in the 21st century. Will my son grow up to live in a world rife with tribalism or will this time be a relatively brief moment of humanity back sliding on it’s natural tendencies to ostracize, to blame, to envy and to lack courage, before moving forward again?
I’m going to attempt to rely on two things that give hope:
Firstly, the vast majority of the people that I experience in the flesh are demonstrably at odds with the images and stories that are relentlessly presented via the endless sources of information that obliterate reason, context and especially wisdom. In spite of this information gridlock, this endless breaking news and false urgency, this never-ending processional of demons and fake angels, and atmospheric rivers (deliberate use of recently made-up, dramatic meteorological term designed to create fear and panic) of self-righteous indignation, people still seem to be mostly reasonable when encountered in public.
And two, my wife.
A few years ago, she was stuck on a jury trial in the dread Clara Shortridge Foltz courthouse on Temple here in L.A. Three weeks, three large scoops worth of bureaucratic bullshit (no place does it quite like CA). Lasting impressions of the judicial system here in good ‘ol CA were that it was an incredibly inefficient and wasteful system, subject to whimsy and arbitrary decisions by authorities, rampant bureaucratic sloth and mediocrity resulting in a mostly unqualified jury that operated on groupthink fear and coercion. She was the only juror who refused to bow to group pressure to change her mind and ended up being the only thing that stood between a dumb ass drunk dude and some time spent in Corcoran. The other jurors ultimately admitted that they didn’t really care whether or not they were right but, just wanted to get it over with and go home. Dude will never know how close he was and why he didn’t have to make the trip to the sunny San Juaquin Valley for a staycation courtesy of California Dept of Corrections and Rehabilitaion.
And why didn’t that fool go to prison? Because my wife has extremely rare courage. She doesn’t need to be liked. She doesn’t care if someone thinks that she is a ‘dumb Mexican bitch’. She doesn’t care if someone thinks that she is a peasant. She doesn’t need approval. She doesn’t need to be included. She doesn’t need for you accept her. She doesn’t need your pity. She doesn’t need your understanding. She doesn’t need your generosity. She doesn’t need you to denounce your privilege. She doesn’t need to be a hero. She doesn’t need for you to think that she is virtuous. She doesn’t need to be part of a tribe to feel strength.
She just needs to be truthful.
So, let’s hope for those with more courage than us, like my wife, to lead.
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