Lemme tell you something about white people:
We have more spiritual impediments than everybody except politicians.
Now before I insult some really nice, pure-hearted white person, let me explain myself.
We’re not raised right. This is my thesis. We’re not raised right in this country (perhaps I should expand beyond the whites here; still, if Islam has taught me anything about culture, it’s that we white people have more of a cultural identity than I had previously thought, in my whitewashed existence. And God knows best).
We’re raised – and by we, I mean, of course, I – to believe primarily in the self. To begin with, we’re raised in small families. Mine is fairly giant by today’s standards, with a whopping six members in our nuclear unit alone! But even so, I grew up not sharing a bedroom, or a plate, or a doll, or much of anything besides the dog. And to think, I criticized only children for being naturally selfish. God forgive me. If only they could see me now, with more pet peeves than Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets.
The four kids in my family had wide-ranging interests that sent my mother into a carpooling frenzy for an untold number of her middle years. God bless her. My two older siblings went to boarding school while my brother and I (who are much closer in age) were still quite young. But we two kept our parents busy shuttling us from soccer to hockey to piano to ballet to gymnastics, and then, as a result, to the orthopedic surgeon for a number of dislocated years. And by we, I mean, of course, I.
In school, I was naturally competitive, and was further encouraged in the trait by my teachers. I spoke out in class, a surprisingly dedicated and feisty feminist of twelve. I aced math and science exams, and excelled in just about anything I could get my hands on, except – you guessed it – team sports. Dance was my thing. Very individual. Also very cooperative. It has that tasty balance of trust and love for your fellow dancers, and beauty-body-talent-skill-flexibility-grace feuding every night of the week. Delicious.
My parents, in loving support, told me, You can be anything. Anything, indeed? Yes, darling, anything. The world is your oyster.
Ah. There’s the rub.
See, I’m a girl, and a member of one of the first generations raised in the aftermath of the feminist movement – equality is a female president, and women eating the corporate food chain like chocolate, baby! - so it’s understandable, it’s expected, and it was very kindly meant by everyone who said it, hinted at it, or spoonfed it to us in one way or another.
With such assurances, high school trained up my arrogance and selfishness very well, and I planned on going on to college and, after a brilliant thesis, changing the world. But it wasn’t all bad. My adolescent self was a tad self-serving, but not evil. I had a good heart in there somewhere, however fatally arrogant and self-centered I was. I cared about people, participated in causes, protested Bush’s first ascent to Washington like a good little liberal, and cooperated with my fellow theater enthusiasts in putting on shows.
But it was still my oyster, and I didn’t like sharing. I didn’t deal with disappointment well, and to a certain degree I still don’t. Under a kindly facade, I liked things just so. I might not say so, really – I was brought up too well for that – but I resented every imagined and real affront and nursed it in my heart like a baby seal or something. I’ve spent my twenties trying to train this out of myself, in fits of grumbling, self-censured bitterness.
The problem with ‘the world is your oyster,’ besides becoming a serious spiritual handicap after too many years, is roommates. Wait no, let’s revise that – any relationship at all. Teacher-student, friendship, sibling, cousins, uncles, you name it. According to the doctrine of ‘the world is your oyster,’ all these people are, in peeved moments, are obstacles lying in the way of us having everything the way we like it, the way we left it, or how it ought to be. And then we have to bite our tongues – perhaps, in the process, building mountains of barely-concealed ill will in our psyches, or risk seriously offending people we actually care about very much, under our festering resentment.
The problem with crowning individualism is that the people who live out solitary lives are actually devastatingly lonely. Sex in the City is painful to watch even if it doesn’t make your moral hairs stand on end. Because the oppressive, fashionably-clad loneliness is stifling. And it’s real. Those characters are fictional, but there are a lot of people close to forty, and forty, and beyond, out there who are still single – and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the reasons is that we just can’t live together gracefully. We’ve got too many doggone ways.
Tricky. Very tricky.
I had a revelation the other day. It’s very obvious, and very sad that it took me this long to see it exactly in this way. (Someone like my lovely sister-in-law, God bless her, who was raised around numerous family members she was taught to serve selflessly out of love, no questions asked, would, I imagine, smack me playfully for my shameful white stupidity.) So here it is: all those people that bug me, in their very tiny and harmless ways – it’s not them that is bothering me. They’re not the problem, and whatever it is that they’re doing that is like nails on a chalkboard is not the problem either. My feelings of having been slighted, my taking it personally, and my annoyance – those are the problems. If someone else leaves a mess, say, I can clean it up – either doing it because it’s the nice thing to do, and I should place myself at the service of others whenever I can, because therein lies the spiritual path, or with a black and angry heart that only gets blacker and angrier with every wiped up crumb.
Now I’m wondering why I’ve consigned myself to such torture. For Pete’s sake, woman, clean up the freaking mess and be done with it!
…I just want to submit, briefly, that I’m not maligning the idea of equality between the sexes. I do think that the Western version of the idea is, frankly, bizarre – please see Martha Stewart and Britney Spears for further reference – but I’m not suggesting that men are better than women. What I mean to hint at here is that in the fifties, maybe American men were a little selfish and a little hard on their wives – prompting many “mysterious” depressions and The Feminine Mystique, among others. But the “feminist” solution was not to tell the men to be less selfish – it was to tell the women to be equally as selfish as the men. So instead of fighting over equal rights to education, we find ourselves bickering over whose night it is to cook or whose turn it is to take out the trash – and God forbid that either party would lovingly budge and actually try to do extra. Which leaves us in our current quandary of either being resentfully yet lovingly attached, or serenely yet lonesomely single. No dice, if you’re asking this white girl.
