Ask yourself questions. It’s important to do this whenever you are faced with conflict or a change or an issue to resolve. The media tend to give us plenty of reasons to examine ourselves lately, and I’ve done it, too.
This past week I read about more cancel culture and scandal about what is okay if you’re not caught doing it when people are hyper aware of what is being morally challenged at present. Once it’s a hot topic, you are doomed. We tend to light the torches and storm the castle long after much damage has already been done. Naturally what was accepted in the past may not be accepted today, but now the prevailing solution is to find, microscopically dissect, judge and then banish the people and things, rather than logically examine and settle the issues so they serve as our history before progress. That is to say, one cannot change without having had a reason to do so, and that reason is as important to display as how we achieved the improvements which made them no longer relevant. That is how we keep statues to flawed historical figures: put the good and bad on the brass plaque.
I asked myself if I should judge people like the current New York governor who is developing an accusatory queue of women saying he was acting in an inappropriate manner with them. One noted, however, that he asked her if he could kiss her: that does not appear on the surface to make him, by definition, a full-fledged jerk. Most of the men with groping on their minds simply zero in on their target and ask no permission. That doesn’t mean he is not guilty there or elsewhere, but it does possibly indicate his character may not be without redemptive qualities. I was always taught to expect men to treat me with respect, but that was decades ago, and I’m not so sure that such advice is offered to young women now (and who knows what guidance young men get these days). Our world still has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude about relationships, but we only know the attitude goes astray when we read that something has gone wrong.
Then a supposed Christian with sexuality issues suddenly targeted several businesses where he had received massages from women, opened fire and killed eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. The developing story is that he felt addicted to sex, being in his twenties, and an official speculated that he had a “bad day.” His church is appalled, the Asian community is aghast, and the society of white people–in which I include myself–sit and read what is provided to us about how this accused killer may have taken a wrong turn at a fork in the road we all seem to know exists but do nothing about. Becoming a man (or woman)* is part of our biology, but at that point the when and how become a gray area. Here seems to be a man at the start of his adult life, who apparently feared his sexuality more than his creator who gave it to him. Being a sexual human became a problem for which nobody may have offered a solution. He may have decided to remove the problem by getting rid of what made him feel good and guilty at the same time. The women provided a service he did not have to use, but what were his other choices?
I asked myself if I have an issue with Asian women offering massage services, and the answer was no; if they didn’t offer it, somebody else would. Massage is not an exclusive Asian specialty any more than Chinese takeout is (the takeout concept was domestically developed, but we expect the restaurants to be run by who we want to assume prepares the food: if a German man in lederhosen was cooking at a pizzeria, would you do a double-take?)
Just as genocides have happened, so did Dr. Seuss, whose books sometimes contained drawings which, at the time they were written, were interpreting culturally familiar figures which today would be considered stereotypes, and so did cigarette machines in restaurants and hotel lobbies. The Pep Boys no longer smoke in their corporate logo, but not because there are no cigarette machines: people still smoke.
A television news reporter named Jonathan Pie lost his cool back in 2018 while reading copy concerning issues with the “Little House” stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder. He went on a tear because the idea was to not continue publishing works referencing slavery, while he stressed that slavery happened and we abolished it but don’t want to remember that testaments to our history help us not repeat the same mistakes in the future (the video is called “Oppression Obsession,” and though it is laden with colorful language matching his ire, it is just as relevant now as then).
So I did ask myself who I am, and the answer was a living person still learning. We should all keep remembering what we can improve, but remember where the improvements came from. Church groups may be where the subject of sexuality should be a topic in some way. young men and women* should still get the sex education films as soon as possible. We should review when to keep our hands to ourselves. And a guy in lederhosen should make my next Kung Pao chicken.
*(For purposes of clarity, my posts will refer to the two basic biological genders of male and female, but you should not feel that I have excluded you if your identity is not of these two choices: it’s just that we have not improved that terminology beyond “non-binary” yet.)
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