Good morning, Po,
We are back from USC where we spent two amazing days being introduced to the environment Ammo is entering in a few weeks. It was an incredible place and they did an excellent job with the orientation-- although on the last day, they had a session where they played an interview with a mother sending her son off and passed around boxes of kleenex which everyone thought was very funny until halfway through when you could barely hear the speaker for the sobbing throughout the audience. Dan was horrified when they started passing a mike around for people to talk about their "feelings". It was a sort of impromptu support session-- people were breaking down all over the place. I was taking notes for a column, while Dan was sliding under his seat and muttering to himself, "I don't CARE that her separation anxiety began at birth.."
But I digress before I begin. USC requires a core curriculum that involves taking classes from 6 areas that overall are supposed to develop critical analysis and explore different themes or areas in humanities and the sciences. One of the courses was called Literature of Deviance, Monstrocity and Freakishness-- and it was about how we create "the other", how we define what is normal by constructing the abnormal. The course was using books, movies, TV, and current events. Some of the works they would be studying were In Cold Blood, The Stranger, Deliverance, The Yellow Wallpaper, Girl, Interrupted, Trainspotting, Silence of the Lambs-- it sounded fascinating, ALL the courses sound fascinating! We even were given a sample class by a professor from the Biomed school on the brain that was so great all the parents were insane with jealousy-- one father even asked if parents could attend lectures.
Anyway- when you said white American lives were not frightening or threatening, I think that that very fact, because we are so comfortable, makes us all the more vulnerable to the phenomenon of us v. them. Even those who are "compassionate", do so in a way that maintains that division. Of course, compassionate behavior is certainly preferable to destructive, but I don't know that we are wired to be all-inclusive. It must be a survival trait that goes wayyyyy back.. |
