Day #73: The 1990s
It's hard when you feel like you want to hide out in your house from your family.
Today wasn't bad it just...wasn't anything, really. I guess lazy days are okay sometimes but it's hard when not being lazy isn't really an option. Sigh. I could have much bigger things to complain about.
I chatted with my sister for a bit. The last couple of conversations we've had have left me less than satisfied...like any good sibling she's good at annoying me without realizing she's doing it, but today was better. She's also watching that Mrs. America show and she said something that was so interesting to me. She said she feels like when we were in high school and college (for reference, she started high school in the fall of 1992 and graduated from college in the spring of 1999, I am two years behind her so for me it was 1994-2001...we went to a three year high school) it was really uncool to be a feminist. I said, well, maybe in high school in our little suburban hick town but not at one of the most liberal colleges in the sate (which we both attended.) She said no, I remember in college the idea was feminism wasn't needed, we're all kind of the same, that's behind us.
This was WILDLY not my college experience, and I was trying to figure out what it was about the two years between us that made such a difference. My memory of college was that my friends were very into LGBTQ rights, that a sexual assault on campus had us all talking about believing victims LONG before that was a mainstream thing, and that we had campus days where minorities (on one day) and women (on another) walked out of class to demonstrate what life would be like without us on campus, as there was a big debate raging at the time about a statewide initiative to ban affirmative action.
And then I realized something...my sister has gotten more liberal in the years since college. And I'm not sure that I have. I think I may have gone a little in the opposite direction.
Now, let me put that word liberal into a frame of reference. Yes, we were raised by suburban Lutheran Reagan Republicans, but there's no way either my sister or I is ever going to be a conservative person. In 1988, as she was turning 12 years old, my sister hand drew a Michael Dukakis sign in crayon and hung it in our living room window. My parents didn't agree with her politics but they liked that she had opinions and wanted to express them so they allowed her to move the sign to the rec room, still facing the street but not in the living room. I don't think my sister has ever voted for a Republican presidential candidate in her life. She studied Spanish in school and is fluent so her connections with the Latino community are deep and real and she has often been a volunteer interpreter for many organizations, so she has incredibly strong feelings on immigration.
She's also a very religious person and has always gone to more conservative churches than I have, preferring nondenominational large (maybe not "mega") churches over the mainline Protestant denominations, which have, oddly enough, become much more liberal in the 21st century than their nondenominational cousins.
Me, I was a political science major (because it was easy and I had to major in something,) and a lifelong Girl Scout with strong ties to the lesbian community and strong feelings about my friends' rights to love who they love. (I learned from my dad years after her death that my mom, also a lifelong Girl Scout, had several lifelong lesbian friends and while in that time it wasn't commonly spoken about she loved them and their partners, they were open with her, and she was a safe person to be out to, this would have been in the 1970s, possibly earlier.) I marched in my fair share of Take Back the Night marches on campus. I wasn't extraordinarily political for a political science major. (I remember on election night 2000 I had a class but most people weren't able to go because oddly enough most political science majors had campaigns they volunteered for or other places they needed to be on election night, our professor was fine with that and happily watched returns with the dozen or so of us with no place better to go. It was a weekly class on Tuesday nights, and while most of us left at around 9 or 10, she came to class the following week and said when I left last week a few of you said you were going to stick around until the results were final, I just want to be sure...everyone did eventually go home, right?) I was religious and had internalized a pro life message, if not a virulent one, but I was pretty quiet about that as a pro choice stance within my crowd was just assumed. I've gained a much more nuanced view of choice as I've gotten older, known more people, and had a broader life experience.
So both of us were pretty liberal and are to this day, but my sister's friends were of a far more religious and less activist crowd in college...I can see how, and especially in the late 1990s that would have been a crowd of people who would not have liked or chosen to call themselves feminists. And in the couple of decades since the 1990s a lot has happened in the world that has made my sister (and she's not the only one) both more political and more liberal.
As for me...my beliefs haven't changed all that much. They are still around people being free to exist...I still want my friends to love who they love and I'm still a fan of social justice and acknowledging that we didn't blink our eyes and erase four plus centuries of history that enslaved and dehumanized whole swaths of the population and we all continue to suffer because of it. I've gotten much more nuanced on choice, I understand that reproductive justice is something that we should talk about because there are times in a woman's life where she needs to end a pregnancy and times when she needs to carry one to term and for many women they need more support with both of those options. I think we all do better when we spend time with people who don't look or pray or speak or feel like we do and that would help our international relations as well as our immigration policies and just being better humans. So you can see, I'm not a super conservative person.
What has changed in the past few decades for me is I have less patience for liberals who think they have the right answers and a monopoly on morality or intelligence. I think the elitism of the left is real and is dangerous and is one of the factors causing the current political mess.
My sister when she watches Mrs. America just sees what a witch Phyllis Shlafly was, and I won't argue that, but what I am watching are the people around her. The women who took it personally when Gloria Steinem's people said they don't represent housewives. Who felt dismissed and not listened to and belittled and because of that they turned to Phyllis Schlafly because she was really good at making them feel empowered.
That is something I have seen living and working in liberal Seattle. I remember an administrator at a school I worked at basically saying that she was sure a student was acting like a jerk to a fellow student with a nontraditional family because "that's a very religious family and he's just going to parrot what he's being taught at home." Not a nice way to talk about an incredibly diverse and complex religion that includes about a third of the Earth's population, which is what Christianity is. A couple of weeks later the same person was loathe to go to a private schools conference made up largely of religious schools because "those people are never any fun." I said to her without blinkingk "Oh, if it's hosted in (my hometown,) you probably met (so and so) from (insert school name here.) You know, my mom taught there." See also how irritated I was when a boss at a library I once worked at talked about "how conservative our communities are" when speaking about what kinds of books were likely to be banned or challenged. I wanted to get in her face and say, I went to high school less than a mile from here, this is my fucking community. I live here, my family lives here, my friends live here, they raise their kids here, and some of them are gay!" I get so over the top tired of people who like to talk a lot about how inclusive they are speaking in as broad generalizations as the other side without even stopping to breathe and acknowledge their own hypocrisy.
So, yeah. My beliefs haven't changed all that much. My patience level for those who profess beliefs similar to mine has decreased a lot. And I have less patience when it comes from my "side." We are supposed to be better than "they" are. That's the point.
One thing the current debate is teaching me is that I'm more of a libertarian than I used to think. Yeah, I'm super done with the toxic "I can't wear a mask it makes me look like a pansy" crowd, because, seriously? But I also have zero patience for the "let's shame everyone into wearing them" crowd. I wear one in the grocery store, although like I've said before I don't cinch it at the bottom and I'm leaning towards going back to just a regular bandana over the face because it doesn't fog the glasses so much. But I can't wear one if I'm going to be out of breath at all, even just on a walk around the neighborhood, because I get panicky and can't breathe at all if my face is covered. I remember trying to yank the oxygen mask off when I was laboring with Max because my oxygen levels dropped for a few minutes right at the end and they were trying to get more into me but all the mask was doing was making it harder for me to breathe. They promised me that if I could take deep breaths on my own they wouldn't make me wear it and that worked...but there are still some times, when climbing a hill, etc, when I just can't tolerate it on my face. And I don't like the fact that whether you are or are not wearing one has become a political statement as much as one about health because that doesn't take into account people.
And I think that's to me what is the hardest about my liberal friends of today...there's no room for nuance. If you don't like their candidate, if you don't feel the way they do about one of a myriad of issues, it's over. You're done, you're the bad guy, you're not moral/smart/educated/correct and we are done talking. Everything is us versus them and they are the dumb ones, they are hicks, they are Bible thumpers, they live in flyover country, they are part of that conservative community my boss of long ago was talking about.
The show I'm watching, Little Fires Everywhere, is set in the late 1990s, around the time I started college, and just like the book it bugs the crap out of me. It feels like an unnecessary setting and it feels not real...whoever did the research didn't know enough about the diversity of 1990s music or culture. The daughter of the artist who likes poetry has the boyfriend who writes Kurt Cobain lyrics on her arm and wears a white shell necklace making him look like Zack from Saved By the Bell: the college years?? Really?? In 1997?? I think you can do better than that. But I think one of the reasons for the 1990s setting was that that was the era of "not seeing race" and that kind of thing and they want to show how much we have changed since then.
My opinion? Not all that much. We have come a long way in our treatment of the LGBTQ community, but we aren't "woke," I hate that word more than anything, because enlightenment isn't flipping a switch, it's learning slowly and going forwards and backwards and regressing. Do we do a little better than then, at some things? Maybe. Is it really all that different? Doesn't feel like it to me. Maybe to people younger than me. It's weird to live in a time where pop culture is driven by people younger than you. Apparently there's a whole subculture of milennials who unironically love A Goofy Movie. I hid my love of that movie because I was FAR too old for it but have always been a Goofy fan, but for people 10 years younger than me it's a cult classic. Ye, gods. Maybe I'm super wrong. Maybe the '90s were a really long time ago.
It feels, and maybe this is just because I was younger, like the biggest difference was we were more optimistic back then, This is pre 9/11, pre Great Recession. There was plenty of sad stuff going on, Columbine and the Oklahoma City bombing, but I don't think we felt as much like the world was headed in the wrong direction. And if it was, we had time to head it off. It doesn't feel that way so much anymore. It does feel to me sometimes like we are more scared of this pandemic than we should be...of course it is a big thing, I don't want to minimize the people who have lost their lives and those that still will, but this whole we have to read every article with everything any scientist is researching no matter how out there and we have to spin the most worse case scenarios we can for our facebook friends...this feels like something we wouldn't have done back then. Or maybe without social media it just feels that way because we couldn't have spread it around so much. I don't know. Would we be having mask wars without social media? Seems super unlikely.
I think there are a lot of people who are giving libertarians a really bad name right now, but I do think I'm more of a libertarian than I thought I was. But not more conservative. It's interesting what 20 years has done to the way I feel about the issues. I do wonder about the next 20.
Media consumption, other than Little Fires Everywhere, I watched a lot of How I Met Your Mother which shows you what a brain dead kind of day it was. I didn't read a lot, but I did finish Flora & Ulysses, which was so cute, and I did start Hold Me Closer, the Will Grayson, Will Grayson companion novel. Today launched the #shelfhelp readathon on Instagram, so that's my I started it but never finished it book pick. We also played Sonic the Hedgehog today, all four of us together. Well, Max watched. I miss the days when Josh and I would play video games. We need to do that more.
Today I'm grateful for: a good chat with my sister, cucumber water, coffee, takeout, video games, bedtime, and books.
Today wasn't bad it just...wasn't anything, really. I guess lazy days are okay sometimes but it's hard when not being lazy isn't really an option. Sigh. I could have much bigger things to complain about.
I chatted with my sister for a bit. The last couple of conversations we've had have left me less than satisfied...like any good sibling she's good at annoying me without realizing she's doing it, but today was better. She's also watching that Mrs. America show and she said something that was so interesting to me. She said she feels like when we were in high school and college (for reference, she started high school in the fall of 1992 and graduated from college in the spring of 1999, I am two years behind her so for me it was 1994-2001...we went to a three year high school) it was really uncool to be a feminist. I said, well, maybe in high school in our little suburban hick town but not at one of the most liberal colleges in the sate (which we both attended.) She said no, I remember in college the idea was feminism wasn't needed, we're all kind of the same, that's behind us.
This was WILDLY not my college experience, and I was trying to figure out what it was about the two years between us that made such a difference. My memory of college was that my friends were very into LGBTQ rights, that a sexual assault on campus had us all talking about believing victims LONG before that was a mainstream thing, and that we had campus days where minorities (on one day) and women (on another) walked out of class to demonstrate what life would be like without us on campus, as there was a big debate raging at the time about a statewide initiative to ban affirmative action.
And then I realized something...my sister has gotten more liberal in the years since college. And I'm not sure that I have. I think I may have gone a little in the opposite direction.
Now, let me put that word liberal into a frame of reference. Yes, we were raised by suburban Lutheran Reagan Republicans, but there's no way either my sister or I is ever going to be a conservative person. In 1988, as she was turning 12 years old, my sister hand drew a Michael Dukakis sign in crayon and hung it in our living room window. My parents didn't agree with her politics but they liked that she had opinions and wanted to express them so they allowed her to move the sign to the rec room, still facing the street but not in the living room. I don't think my sister has ever voted for a Republican presidential candidate in her life. She studied Spanish in school and is fluent so her connections with the Latino community are deep and real and she has often been a volunteer interpreter for many organizations, so she has incredibly strong feelings on immigration.
She's also a very religious person and has always gone to more conservative churches than I have, preferring nondenominational large (maybe not "mega") churches over the mainline Protestant denominations, which have, oddly enough, become much more liberal in the 21st century than their nondenominational cousins.
Me, I was a political science major (because it was easy and I had to major in something,) and a lifelong Girl Scout with strong ties to the lesbian community and strong feelings about my friends' rights to love who they love. (I learned from my dad years after her death that my mom, also a lifelong Girl Scout, had several lifelong lesbian friends and while in that time it wasn't commonly spoken about she loved them and their partners, they were open with her, and she was a safe person to be out to, this would have been in the 1970s, possibly earlier.) I marched in my fair share of Take Back the Night marches on campus. I wasn't extraordinarily political for a political science major. (I remember on election night 2000 I had a class but most people weren't able to go because oddly enough most political science majors had campaigns they volunteered for or other places they needed to be on election night, our professor was fine with that and happily watched returns with the dozen or so of us with no place better to go. It was a weekly class on Tuesday nights, and while most of us left at around 9 or 10, she came to class the following week and said when I left last week a few of you said you were going to stick around until the results were final, I just want to be sure...everyone did eventually go home, right?) I was religious and had internalized a pro life message, if not a virulent one, but I was pretty quiet about that as a pro choice stance within my crowd was just assumed. I've gained a much more nuanced view of choice as I've gotten older, known more people, and had a broader life experience.
So both of us were pretty liberal and are to this day, but my sister's friends were of a far more religious and less activist crowd in college...I can see how, and especially in the late 1990s that would have been a crowd of people who would not have liked or chosen to call themselves feminists. And in the couple of decades since the 1990s a lot has happened in the world that has made my sister (and she's not the only one) both more political and more liberal.
As for me...my beliefs haven't changed all that much. They are still around people being free to exist...I still want my friends to love who they love and I'm still a fan of social justice and acknowledging that we didn't blink our eyes and erase four plus centuries of history that enslaved and dehumanized whole swaths of the population and we all continue to suffer because of it. I've gotten much more nuanced on choice, I understand that reproductive justice is something that we should talk about because there are times in a woman's life where she needs to end a pregnancy and times when she needs to carry one to term and for many women they need more support with both of those options. I think we all do better when we spend time with people who don't look or pray or speak or feel like we do and that would help our international relations as well as our immigration policies and just being better humans. So you can see, I'm not a super conservative person.
What has changed in the past few decades for me is I have less patience for liberals who think they have the right answers and a monopoly on morality or intelligence. I think the elitism of the left is real and is dangerous and is one of the factors causing the current political mess.
My sister when she watches Mrs. America just sees what a witch Phyllis Shlafly was, and I won't argue that, but what I am watching are the people around her. The women who took it personally when Gloria Steinem's people said they don't represent housewives. Who felt dismissed and not listened to and belittled and because of that they turned to Phyllis Schlafly because she was really good at making them feel empowered.
That is something I have seen living and working in liberal Seattle. I remember an administrator at a school I worked at basically saying that she was sure a student was acting like a jerk to a fellow student with a nontraditional family because "that's a very religious family and he's just going to parrot what he's being taught at home." Not a nice way to talk about an incredibly diverse and complex religion that includes about a third of the Earth's population, which is what Christianity is. A couple of weeks later the same person was loathe to go to a private schools conference made up largely of religious schools because "those people are never any fun." I said to her without blinkingk "Oh, if it's hosted in (my hometown,) you probably met (so and so) from (insert school name here.) You know, my mom taught there." See also how irritated I was when a boss at a library I once worked at talked about "how conservative our communities are" when speaking about what kinds of books were likely to be banned or challenged. I wanted to get in her face and say, I went to high school less than a mile from here, this is my fucking community. I live here, my family lives here, my friends live here, they raise their kids here, and some of them are gay!" I get so over the top tired of people who like to talk a lot about how inclusive they are speaking in as broad generalizations as the other side without even stopping to breathe and acknowledge their own hypocrisy.
So, yeah. My beliefs haven't changed all that much. My patience level for those who profess beliefs similar to mine has decreased a lot. And I have less patience when it comes from my "side." We are supposed to be better than "they" are. That's the point.
One thing the current debate is teaching me is that I'm more of a libertarian than I used to think. Yeah, I'm super done with the toxic "I can't wear a mask it makes me look like a pansy" crowd, because, seriously? But I also have zero patience for the "let's shame everyone into wearing them" crowd. I wear one in the grocery store, although like I've said before I don't cinch it at the bottom and I'm leaning towards going back to just a regular bandana over the face because it doesn't fog the glasses so much. But I can't wear one if I'm going to be out of breath at all, even just on a walk around the neighborhood, because I get panicky and can't breathe at all if my face is covered. I remember trying to yank the oxygen mask off when I was laboring with Max because my oxygen levels dropped for a few minutes right at the end and they were trying to get more into me but all the mask was doing was making it harder for me to breathe. They promised me that if I could take deep breaths on my own they wouldn't make me wear it and that worked...but there are still some times, when climbing a hill, etc, when I just can't tolerate it on my face. And I don't like the fact that whether you are or are not wearing one has become a political statement as much as one about health because that doesn't take into account people.
And I think that's to me what is the hardest about my liberal friends of today...there's no room for nuance. If you don't like their candidate, if you don't feel the way they do about one of a myriad of issues, it's over. You're done, you're the bad guy, you're not moral/smart/educated/correct and we are done talking. Everything is us versus them and they are the dumb ones, they are hicks, they are Bible thumpers, they live in flyover country, they are part of that conservative community my boss of long ago was talking about.
The show I'm watching, Little Fires Everywhere, is set in the late 1990s, around the time I started college, and just like the book it bugs the crap out of me. It feels like an unnecessary setting and it feels not real...whoever did the research didn't know enough about the diversity of 1990s music or culture. The daughter of the artist who likes poetry has the boyfriend who writes Kurt Cobain lyrics on her arm and wears a white shell necklace making him look like Zack from Saved By the Bell: the college years?? Really?? In 1997?? I think you can do better than that. But I think one of the reasons for the 1990s setting was that that was the era of "not seeing race" and that kind of thing and they want to show how much we have changed since then.
My opinion? Not all that much. We have come a long way in our treatment of the LGBTQ community, but we aren't "woke," I hate that word more than anything, because enlightenment isn't flipping a switch, it's learning slowly and going forwards and backwards and regressing. Do we do a little better than then, at some things? Maybe. Is it really all that different? Doesn't feel like it to me. Maybe to people younger than me. It's weird to live in a time where pop culture is driven by people younger than you. Apparently there's a whole subculture of milennials who unironically love A Goofy Movie. I hid my love of that movie because I was FAR too old for it but have always been a Goofy fan, but for people 10 years younger than me it's a cult classic. Ye, gods. Maybe I'm super wrong. Maybe the '90s were a really long time ago.
It feels, and maybe this is just because I was younger, like the biggest difference was we were more optimistic back then, This is pre 9/11, pre Great Recession. There was plenty of sad stuff going on, Columbine and the Oklahoma City bombing, but I don't think we felt as much like the world was headed in the wrong direction. And if it was, we had time to head it off. It doesn't feel that way so much anymore. It does feel to me sometimes like we are more scared of this pandemic than we should be...of course it is a big thing, I don't want to minimize the people who have lost their lives and those that still will, but this whole we have to read every article with everything any scientist is researching no matter how out there and we have to spin the most worse case scenarios we can for our facebook friends...this feels like something we wouldn't have done back then. Or maybe without social media it just feels that way because we couldn't have spread it around so much. I don't know. Would we be having mask wars without social media? Seems super unlikely.
I think there are a lot of people who are giving libertarians a really bad name right now, but I do think I'm more of a libertarian than I thought I was. But not more conservative. It's interesting what 20 years has done to the way I feel about the issues. I do wonder about the next 20.
Media consumption, other than Little Fires Everywhere, I watched a lot of How I Met Your Mother which shows you what a brain dead kind of day it was. I didn't read a lot, but I did finish Flora & Ulysses, which was so cute, and I did start Hold Me Closer, the Will Grayson, Will Grayson companion novel. Today launched the #shelfhelp readathon on Instagram, so that's my I started it but never finished it book pick. We also played Sonic the Hedgehog today, all four of us together. Well, Max watched. I miss the days when Josh and I would play video games. We need to do that more.
Today I'm grateful for: a good chat with my sister, cucumber water, coffee, takeout, video games, bedtime, and books.
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