From: Mettalaw@aol.com
Date: Wed Nov 28 2001 - 12:00:31 PST
I remember...my kidhood felt like what you describe. But I also remember how confident we were that our ethnocentric, egocentric, anthropocentric and linear view of ourselves as the masters of progress led us into blunder after blunder. I remember my father killing rabbits at dawn around our private camping spot---just for fun. One morning he almost got me by mistake. I remember how we torpoedoed big juice cans in the lake with the .22. The jagged metal and the lead shot is probably still on the lake bottom. I remember the walls of trash along Alberta highways, because nobody had thought about littering. I remember garages full of enough DDT to kill a small city. I remember nuclear testing, the hype about how nuclear power was going to give us lives of endless ease, and the shock at finding strontium 90 in mothers' milk. My body remembers having to smoke my father's cigars, second-hand---I'm waiting for the bill for that one to come in one of these days. I remember the ugly little girl in Grade One who was shunned because she was incontinent and wore inferior clothes. I remember polio, and Leah, my plump classmate who mysteriously disappeared from Grade Five, to return for just a day visit months later, scrawny in the last stages of cancer. I remember the 15-year-old who was flown to Europe to abort the child of her English teacher and who eventually committed suicide, yet he never suffered so much as a complaint against him. I remember the Governor-General's award-winner in my class, who killed himself at nineteen after what he saw on his summer job in the far north. Had they been born a few decades later, each of these people would have found more help, enough, perhaps, to live on. I remember the Cuba crisis: having to hunch under our useless desks in twice-weekly school drills and trying to decide what I cared about enough to pack into the little satchel each of us was allowed in our emergency nuclear-fallout shelter. I remember "history" books all about what white men did, the wars they fought and the politics they thought up, books without women or people of color or the Earth in them. Life was pretty nice for us, true. We were the best off people on Earth. We were also blind about the effects of our actions and the needs of others. Sometimes I think my generation is all about curing tunnel vision. Our vision is now wide enough to take in all three ladies, Wisdom and her usual companions, Pain and Loss. It didn't come easy, and there's at least another mile to walk in these uncomfortable moccasins before we can say that we truly see our places in the world. Sorry if this is a downer, but I had to say it. In spite of my longing for the spcious world of trust, friendliness, and community we both remember, I remember only too well the deficiencies that bring the tears to memory. Eva ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Universal Inkjet Refill Kit $29.95 Refill any ink cartridge for less! Includes black and color ink. http://us.click.yahoo.com/f00vhB/MkNDAA/ySSFAA/r1FolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: timewitnesses-unsubscribe@egroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/