Right now, I am horribly out of fashion in my having voted for Dubya, and my support of the war in Iraq. It would appear that, in spite of the great idealism of my youth, I am currently displaying some ever-so-slightly conservative tendencies. This would have made me terribly in-step with the popular adult multitudes of my parents’ generation when they were the age I am at now (48), but makes me currently unfashionable.
It is a cause for slight astonishment on the parts of some casual conversation-partners, just as they would have been astonished at my emergent feminism and eco-conservatism when I was a teenager. Lip-service to these stances is required today, of course. My mother used to try to get to the mail every month before me to confiscate my copy of Ms. magazine, and then hide it in the locked drawer of her desk. No, she didn’t want to read it herself. She didn’t like reading things. I learned quickly how to find her key.
I was, at the expensive all-girls’ school that she and my father sent me to, being carefully taught by extremely intelligent teachers how to think. They all actually tried to get us to think for ourselves, and some of us inevitably succumbed to temptation. As an English major at Vanderbilt, I was again thrown on my mind’s own resources. “Don’t go to the library,” the professors would inevitably say when assigning papers. “Write your own ideas.” I ended up with sixty-three semester hours of English literature credits, and only did one research paper.
They might have warned me that being taught how to think about literature for oneself at such an early stage of one’s career would make me unsuited for a “normal” graduate student career (and it did), but I regard it as an acceptable price to pay for having arrived at adulthood with the ability to think for myself.
This is probably what has gone wrong with me, and caused me to dare to hold unfashionable stances in favor of at least some of what our president and armed forces are currently, as I write, up to. Ah, well.
Enough of this for now… I shall work further along these lines and post later. I don’t want to sound more disjointed than I strictly have to.
white pebble 