PERSONAL PASSAGE
Whether anything that I have written in the last four days makes sense to you or not, or whether you even got this far along, at this point I was suddenly brought up short because I suddenly realized that I was personally on a different path, that I was an outsider trying to make my own way along in my own way and probably everyone else is, too. The MAGA/liberal dichotomy hasn’t been a major issue in my life. It is someone else’s problem. Becasue I realized that I am not a very typical liberal, either, and that I don’t fit comfortably into liberal values, either. Who was I to be trying to help other people get along when I wasn’t able to fit in myself to American cultural patterns?
While the great polarization is between Americans (who otherwise share language, basic religion, food, sports, education, entertainment) who live in rural areas and want to return to traditional American values and those who live in urban areas who embrace change that is carrying us into the future. Really, these are simply two different perspectives, one looking back and holding on to the past and the other looking forward and embracing the future. I am almost comparing apples and oranges. Both sides are right, just about different things.
But as an individual with my experience of growing up in India and marrying a German and embracing German culture as well and teaching in a small liberal college I have my own experience of what gives me identity that is only loosely connected with MAGA values and liberal values. In addition my identity is probably to some extent as much genetic as it is formed by the places in which I have lived which is neither American rural life or city life. What makes me feel fully alive, my identity, comes from both my genes and my experience. What makes me feel fully alive is a product of my unique make up and experience. But this means that neither MAGA or liberal is a good fit for me. In being as fully alive as I can be in my brief time on earth I have to engage in activities that make me feel fully alive, not activities dictated by MAGA people or liberal people.
As a personal example, although I taught in a liberal college, the way that I taught wasn’t what was expected of me. I didn’t really believe in teaching an academic subject in an academic way. I didn’t really believe in academic conventions. I was most alive when feeling my way along in a visceral way through class discussions in which students kept journals as they felt their way along in personal ways and then shared their passage in class discussions. In my teaching I slowly abandoned traditional ways of teaching, first dropping lectures and then tests and then textbooks and finally dropping the subject, itself, itself for the title of course. I didn’t, I couldn’t, write an academic dissertation so didn’t get a PhD. In fact I used almost nothing of the endless courses I took in graduate school in what we did in class. In classes with various academic subject titles we discussed the meaning of life and our own passage with passing reference to whatever the class was titled. I believed in our combined experience of life, so much that I tried to share the experience of India with school children through Indian fairs put on in the local elementary school and I shared the experience of Sri Lanka and India with students by taking them to South Asia for two or four months during which time I tried to make it possible for them to experience India as fully as possible. We didn’t have classes or lectures, we had village homestays and work experiences in as many place as possible and then to make their experience as intense as possible I released them for two months on their own to find their own intense experience of India. I’m sure no other college academic experience abroad did the same thing.
I’m not proud of this and it is only after having been retired for 15 years that I can confess it. I got away with it because students knew exactly what experience they were getting into in my classes and my trips to South Asia and they liked learning in this way, or most of them did. If they didn’t they wouldn’t sign up for my classes.
But the point that I am trying to make is not that this is the right way to teach or learn or make your way through life, it was simply my way, it was what was alive for me and some students, it was the way to be true to my identity. The institutional part of teaching that I didn’t fit well into was something that I needed to escape to India every other year just to maintain my own identity. My identity wasn’t MAGA and it wasn’t liberal academic, either. I didn’t fit into either one. I’ve written about not fitting well into any form of American life. In the last two years I have traveled at age 85 for a month each to Greece, Germany, Paris, London, Amtrak around the United States, Morocco, India, Germany/Netherlands and am about to go to Montevideo and then Italy and then Greece again. I don’t recommend this to anyone else and a number of people think I am risking life and limb or am nuts (or they envy me). Other people don’t have this same need to travel.
But the point that I am making is that I don’t fit into either tribe, MAGA or Liberal (from which I am constantly escaping). In order to be fully alive I have to go my own way, nutty as it may sound to others. And I am assuming that this is true of many MAGA or liberal people. Those of us who don’t fit into either tribe have to be leery of getting constrained by one tribe or the other. And those of us who fit into one tribe or the other, rural or urban, simply by accident of our birth or where we end up living, have to think twice before accepting either identity since we may have arrived at this identity by chance rather than by choice. In the end we have to find the passage that is right for us, personally, and follow it whether it pleases others or not. In the end the important thing is not to resolve the tension between MAGA and liberal but to affirm our own identity, what makes us fully alive, by going our own way.
So much for MAGA/liberal. Tomorrow I’ll change the subject to something else.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 