Freedom
1.17.06
I met a man at Trader Joe's, my cashier du jour, sweet eyed, brown skinned, from Tunisia. He was prompted to ask me about a dance school near where he lives because I was doing some foot work while waiting in line and the man behind me, another cashier I have chatted with, commented, saying "wondeful" and we all got to talkinga about dance and music. Turns out Mohem has been here for 7 years and is doing well. I asked him how people are treating him and he said "good, thank you for asking."
For some reason I am thinking about him now after reading this week's New Yorker and noting a cartoon featuring a man lying on a shrinks couch as the shrink takes notes. The caption reads "Could we up the dosage? I still have feelings." I won't re-visit my rant about how we're all running around stuffing our feelings, but last night there was a section on ABC about some enormous morbidly obese men, one over 1,000 pounds which did mention a therapist who works with these people on an in-patient basis and said that the one thing they all had in common was some kind of abuse in their past.
So, I'm now thinking about feelings, how afraid we are to have them, how some of us were allowed to express them as kids and do so well as adults, and some of us weren't. How childhood trauma, abuse and neglect can cause so many of us to swallow, hide, misdirect our righteous feelings of loneliness, anger, sadness, even happiness. How as adults these repressed feelings can pop up in the oddest ways, like sarcasm, or passive aggressive behaviour or road rage. How we are happier to medicate to eradicate these feelings, than actually deal with them.
And I meet someone like Mohem who has left his nation, his culture to pursue a better life and wonder about the millions of immigrants who come here for some freedoms, whether religious or economic. I wonder about the societies they come from and whether they do a better job of handling all of these emotions we do battle with every day. Never having lived for any real length of time in anything but my own culture, Western Civilization (which Ghandi once commented would be a "good idea") I know I am prone to romanticizing the green grass on the other side of borders.
But I do find it ironic, that we, this nation of ultimate freedoms, purports to allow all pursuits of happiness and inclinations, yet so many of us seem so uncomfortable with some of our most basic instincts: to challenge, to create, to run and play, to sing and dance, to be truly who we are even when it doesn't fit in with someone's expectations. Do immigrants, once they've met their needs for housing and income and safety and transportation and remittances back home, feel these freedoms of expression as we do? I see so many more displays of phsyical affection in public among the Latino population; are they more comfortable with showing tenderness and desire than we are? Or do they simply not have the privacy to do it elsewhere?
Perhaps I will ask Mohem and the Ethiopian contractor I met at the hardware store how the "feel" in this great nation of ours. More like themselves? The selves they could not be at home? This would seem to be the ultimate freedom; not to be able to vote (although that is part of self acutalizing) or purchase or be free from various forms of persecution, but to fully become whoever our destiny holds. Isn't this our greatest challenge, then, "to be or not to be?"
I met a man at Trader Joe's, my cashier du jour, sweet eyed, brown skinned, from Tunisia. He was prompted to ask me about a dance school near where he lives because I was doing some foot work while waiting in line and the man behind me, another cashier I have chatted with, commented, saying "wondeful" and we all got to talkinga about dance and music. Turns out Mohem has been here for 7 years and is doing well. I asked him how people are treating him and he said "good, thank you for asking."
For some reason I am thinking about him now after reading this week's New Yorker and noting a cartoon featuring a man lying on a shrinks couch as the shrink takes notes. The caption reads "Could we up the dosage? I still have feelings." I won't re-visit my rant about how we're all running around stuffing our feelings, but last night there was a section on ABC about some enormous morbidly obese men, one over 1,000 pounds which did mention a therapist who works with these people on an in-patient basis and said that the one thing they all had in common was some kind of abuse in their past.
So, I'm now thinking about feelings, how afraid we are to have them, how some of us were allowed to express them as kids and do so well as adults, and some of us weren't. How childhood trauma, abuse and neglect can cause so many of us to swallow, hide, misdirect our righteous feelings of loneliness, anger, sadness, even happiness. How as adults these repressed feelings can pop up in the oddest ways, like sarcasm, or passive aggressive behaviour or road rage. How we are happier to medicate to eradicate these feelings, than actually deal with them.
And I meet someone like Mohem who has left his nation, his culture to pursue a better life and wonder about the millions of immigrants who come here for some freedoms, whether religious or economic. I wonder about the societies they come from and whether they do a better job of handling all of these emotions we do battle with every day. Never having lived for any real length of time in anything but my own culture, Western Civilization (which Ghandi once commented would be a "good idea") I know I am prone to romanticizing the green grass on the other side of borders.
But I do find it ironic, that we, this nation of ultimate freedoms, purports to allow all pursuits of happiness and inclinations, yet so many of us seem so uncomfortable with some of our most basic instincts: to challenge, to create, to run and play, to sing and dance, to be truly who we are even when it doesn't fit in with someone's expectations. Do immigrants, once they've met their needs for housing and income and safety and transportation and remittances back home, feel these freedoms of expression as we do? I see so many more displays of phsyical affection in public among the Latino population; are they more comfortable with showing tenderness and desire than we are? Or do they simply not have the privacy to do it elsewhere?
Perhaps I will ask Mohem and the Ethiopian contractor I met at the hardware store how the "feel" in this great nation of ours. More like themselves? The selves they could not be at home? This would seem to be the ultimate freedom; not to be able to vote (although that is part of self acutalizing) or purchase or be free from various forms of persecution, but to fully become whoever our destiny holds. Isn't this our greatest challenge, then, "to be or not to be?"
posted by Barbery at 10:16 PM
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