...thinks the slowest.
This is going to be a slightly rambling diary, so I'll apologize in advance - I made a mistake this morning (details unimportant) and my brain is more scrambled than the best damn eggs this side of a fertility clinic.
It all starts with a joke about identities...
"There will come a time," goes the joke, "when wearing of phylacteries and prayer shawl will not keep a man out of the White House - unless, of course, that man is Jewish."
I was thinking of how much I like the phrase "President Barack Obama". Look, to be honest, I voted for the guy in November because he isn't Sen. John McCain. No, I don't agree with a lot of the ideas he has. But whatever anyone thinks about his policy platform, unless you are a die-hard racist troglodyte, you have to admit that his being elected was really awesome from the point of view of milestones in social progress. And it occurred to me: is that joke, mentioned above, now outdated?
I'm not planning to run for office, in case you were wondering. I don't have the relentless ambition required, and don't want to have to self-promote so aggressively. I tend to be shy and soft-spoken, not traits people look for in their elected officials. But it would be cool if I could win an election if I did run. Kind of like, say, the second amendment says I could bear arms if I chose to, and I exercise my freedom under that rule by choosing not to.
Identities, right. I got sidetracked. I also thought of my maternal grandmother, now deceased, who was generally a good and righteous person, although she had some very socially conservative ideas. Late in her life, she suffered from a series of tiny, undetectable strokes that were slowly eating away her memories and orientation in space and time.
She had always loved her son and daughters, although she didn't necessarily like the choices they'd made or their identities that they'd settled into. For example, my mother (her eldest) changed religion, her son became a woodworker and got a college degree in his 40s rather than in his 20s like she'd hoped, and her youngest, my favorite aunt, grew up to be a (former) professional athlete and psychiatric social worker - and a lesbian.
Remember I mentioned the socially conservative ideas my grandmother had?
We were sitting around a table at some family gathering - aunt, aunt's then-girlfriend (now life partner, an adoptive aunt from my POV), uncle and his wife, the other aunt and her husband, and my folks. The kids, including myself, were at an adjacent table. Now, at some point in the conversation, it was mentioned that some famous woman had come out of the closet and stated publicly that she was a lesbian. This was met with general approval, except from my grandmother, who looked a bit confused, until she said:
I don't know what lesbians are - I think I must have known it once, but I must have forgotten it - but they're bad people. You stay away from them.
All the adults and a couple of the kids (myself included) burst out with giggles, including the soccer-playing girlfriend, except for the favorite aunt ("Mooommm!"), because we knew she couldn't remember that her own daughter was a lesbian but she loved her anyway. She only remembered that the word evoked vague feelings of negativity.
You know the thing with inter-communal tensions? People of different colors (as it were) not mixing too well, in many cases, and suchlike? I think to a large extent, maybe entirely, it's because we allow those vague feelings to dictate the things that we say or do. We don't use the thinking process that does its best to rationally weigh the known factors and come to conclusions, because it's hard. After all, a brain is not just a machine that thinks, it's a machine that does its best to avoid thinking, because thinking is expensive. You burn more blood sugar that way.
See, my grandmother had an excuse - she was an old-fashioned southern belle and had "shotgun" lesions in her brain. The rest of us? Hell no, we've got no excuse.