When I saw that this week's topic was "Ancestors," it punched me in the gut. I am one of the people who got ground up in the Generation Gap in the 1960s. My birth family were extreme conservative bigots, people who would sit at a dining room table casually discussing that it would be a good idea to ship any American with any African ancestors "back to Africa." They did not appreciate my piping up with "But then wouldn't we have to go back to Europe and leave the continent to the only real natives?"
They in their turn would have been hauled out and put in the stocks, whipped, lynched and maybe killed for their sinful licentious ways. They played cards. They listened to secular music. They spent a lot of money on personal luxuries and the house was full of vanities. They committed all the Seven Deadlies on a daily basis and thought nothing of it. Hahaha nobody takes that kind of thing seriously any more.
Except that worldwide, there's a reason the Dark Ages were called that and they lasted a long, long time.
I go reading history, and find that almost all of my personal forebears would've been lining up to burn me at the stake over all sorts of things ranging from my religion, which is neither Christian nor mainstream, to my disabilities which would have been (and were) considered faults of character till the past fifteen years or so.
I had trouble surviving even the 1950s and 60s. I wouldn't wish my childhood on my worst enemy, it was unlivable. I don't feel safe in all-white neighborhoods because I still remember the cross that got burned on my Illinois lawn in 1972. No, that did not happen in Mississippi or Alabama. It happened in a nice all-white Chicago suburb.
From their writings and what's known of their beliefs and way of life, my ancestors mostly would have despised me. But this isn't true of just me. This is true of most people today. Life has changed enormously. A great deal of the atrocity throughout human history came about because of some bad ideas that gained credence often through atrocities by winners, got established as The Way Things Are and provided plenty of public torture as entertainment for the masses.
Until very recently it was all too natural for the masses to think of that as entertainment and cheerfully join in throwing rocks and rotted things at the designated victims.
I live in a world where I have instant postage-free mail to places like Beijing or Norway or Africa. I live in a broad, rich world with many diverse cultures that cross-connect and when I had to construct my personal view of philosophy, ethics and moral decisions I had most of the world's ideas available to me to sort through. I took my time doing that sorting. In some ways, it is lifelong.
I was never able to just accept the pat answers handed down to me by tradition on these issues because none of them fit the reality of my life. Not one. Nothing that my parents or grandparents (who were themselves more bigoted and closer to the antique ways of viewing life) said made any sense in terms of my life. Most of it I saw through hypocrisies and felt a connection with anyone human -- had to respect other people's differences in order to have any self respect at all.
I'm now looking at life from a perspective where I have a good home, my adopted daughter, son in law and grandkids are getting along better than most families I've even ever met in my life let alone the torture I grew up with. There's much less of a divide between them and me or me and the kids, though the kids are very small yet. What they are getting is a coherent way of life this family worked out and a number of patterns of living that will make them successful in the world the way it is -- not the fantasy world that my parents occupied but this world scale communication and high technology world.
I have no roots.
I have a deep bitterness and anger about that, because even going beyond the immediate conflicts in my birth family, I'm left horrified at most of the history of the part of the world I grew up in. This year, I've seen a future better than I'd ever dreamed, when the President that I voted for got into office and the color line broke at the highest level. It took President Obama's election for me to feel safe in America.
Over many long discussions with my anthropologist son in law, we've talked about culture and what it means. I come from a mixed background, very mixed, mostly Europeans from Italy, Germany, Scotland, England and Wales. Yeah, more than half my ancestors were on the wrong side of WWII and my grandfather was part of the German-American Bund that got together to try to get the USA to jump in on the other side of it. Wonderful thing to know about your forebears. I remember him explaining Hitler wasn't all bad, he did some good things for the German people.
Ordering the Volkswagen designed and built is about the only one I can think of, but anyone can get a good idea.
My grandfather defended the Holocaust because "Whatever else you have to say about it he solved the Jewish Problem for Germany."
Yeah, if you owe someone money, raise a riot against them and kill them so you don't have to pay them back. Works like a charm. Religious strictures kept Europeans from charging interest so they went to Jewish lenders, who prospered doing banking until too many people got angry about actually having to pay back the loans. So let's make them pay for their evil of having different customs and moral ideas.
Where I look for my roots is in prehistory. I look back way beyond recorded history and its atrocities to some time when even my European forebears were tribal people just hunting and fishing and living in groups small enough that they didn't generate great conquerors.
I remember these history lessons where assorted maniacs raising armies to make war on all the rest of the world were held up as Great and that was seen as Greatness, armed robbery on a national scale. It's at the root of a lot of wars and it makes me sick. It was justified -- it was unquestioned, it was the right of empires to rip off anyone unlucky enough to be in their path.
Besides, it was for their own good because it Civilized them and gave them slavery and conscription and crowding and hierarchy and bureaucracy to live with instead of mere primitive egalitarian tribes -- whose ways of life always seem to be closely adapted to climate and place. So many customs do seem to root themselves in common sense when they're back in their original context.
Most of Deuteronomy makes sense as survival strategies for living in a desert.
People wind up getting homesick for the old country, whatever it is. They go into genealogy and go looking for famous people among their forebears and it's all part of a search for group identity -- in a group where most of the members are dead and can't speak up for themselves in shock at how the present members live.
I am a man of the 21st century. I would rather read about the history of life than try to thread my genetic forebears back through this and that country at this and that time when various atrocities were commonplace and seen as a good thing. I find more of a sense of connection when I read about Flores man and Homo Habilis and beyond that the Cretaceous or the awesome Ordovician with its orthocones and sea scorpions.
Life adapts. Life changes. I am a living creature and this is my time, my species is dominant on the planet and our fossils would be found by the millions or billions if some other intelligent species got curious and took up paleontology in a few million years. I find that beautiful in itself.
I do think about human nature all the time, being a writer, but I can't romanticize the past because of who I am. I am the person my parents warned me against.
But so were they. And so were theirs.
To live in a new environment takes conscious decisions and adaptation. To live well takes introspection and moral autonomy, the maturity to question the rules laid down by those in the past who lived in a different world. To live well as a human being means to develop a social network, a web of connections with other people to sustain you emotionally and physically when bad things happen.
I've always found that with my friends. I've found them easier by focusing on the things I do well and that I'm passionate about. There are a lot of good people in the world and they're easy to find online because like attracts like.
At least give your ancestors the respect of accepting that they were who they were, lived in the times they did and had the views they did. They are more foreign to us now than anyone from a different part of the world, because the human world has changed so deep and often in just the past couple of centuries. I like the direction of the changes. I live in my times and I'm not ashamed of that at all, I'm happy about it.
