For a split second I was someplace else as I sat here watching Fiddler on the Roof.

I am ten years old, my daughter’s age, sitting in an old theater with my parents watching Fiddler on the Roof.  My memory is a bit thick about this, but I would swear it was Thanksgiving Week; my parents often took us to a movie on holiday weekends.  This is a special treat; it marks the first time my parents took me to an “adult” movie and not to a children’s movie.  My siblings have been left with a sitter.

I can smell the theater, the popcorn and sticky sweetness of candies, feel the stiff brocade of the theater seats.  I am in awe of the range of emotions, the richness of the characters I am watching.

I still am, even now.  I marvel at how these characters shaped my opinions then and still do to this day.  I can’t help feeling heartsick at the pogrom, the rending tears in culture, the expulsion.

That child sitting in the theater decades ago was surprised at much of what she saw on the screen, recounted with such feeling.

Ah, that the woman here and now could still be so surprised.

10:41:22 PM    comment []

It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.

-- John Adams

Yeah, what he said.  In spades.

10:07:47 PM    comment []

My spouse and I had a big argument yesterday about politics.  I’d been watching CNBC, listening to Tim Russert interviewing two journalists about Bush and the Democrats.  I’d been kvetching loudly at the screen, agreeing with many of the sentiments – in more graphic terms, of course, in the privacy of my home.

Hubby sticks his head in and says I’m over the edge, implying that I should pipe down not just in volume but in message.

Wrong f*cking thing to say to me.

And the second time in a week he’s said this much.  A couple days earlier he’d told my daughter I was getting carried away about politics.  He qualified his comment by saying, Of course, your mother is entitled to her opinion…

My daughter waited until he left the room and then asked me why I was so upset about Bush.  I told her in the simplest, clearest terms that in my opinion, Bush was very wrong about nearly everything he did, from going to war in Iraq to the economy, and that the choices he made were damaging to our country.  She accepted that; I could see she was still concerned, though.  I told her that her dad and I don’t see eye-to-eye on this entirely, that her dad believed I should be quiet.  I told her when one believes things are going very wrong, it’s a duty to say so, to object to being taken down the wrong path.  And further, no one – absolutely NO ONE – has the right to take away your right to speak your mind.  Not your father, not a husband, no one.

And NO ONE grants permission for you to speak your mind – no spouse should ever IMPLY that they do so, either.

Last night degraded instantly after his interjection.  I told him I’d had it with him on the matter of politics, that he was wholly ignorant of what was really going on in this country because he relied only on idiots like those at Faux Network to “feed” him his distorted news.  He told me I had to keep in mind I was shaping young minds.

WHAT THE F*CK??? I thought...HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY???  I yelled at him…

Christ, those people were pissed about taxation!  They were our founding fathers, our freedom fighters – terrorists in the eyes of Good King George.  They didn’t sit around quietly waiting for things to get better.  Some of the finest, most important writings on freedom and human rights came from men who were SCREAMING about the injustice they saw.   They’d be screaming now were they here, over the rapid erosion of civil rights in this country.  For all I know I’m being monitored now by the FBI, my own civil rights violated, because I completely disagreed with Bush on going to war.  That’s fundamentally contradictory to every thing I was taught as school child in this country; as American citizens we have not only a right to speak out but a civic obligation to do so, and no government entity has the right to interfere.

Yeah, you’re gawddamned right I’m shaping young minds.  They should not see me sitting on my hands, my mouth sewn shut by anyone else’s opinions.  They should see me pointing out the inequities of our society, showing them where their future earnings are already committed, model for them a call to our Senator every time a piece of unjust and improper legislation appears before the Senate.

I am still furious about last night’s exchange.  My husband has never been politically active, nor do I see him ever becoming so.  That’s not a model I want my kids to rely upon given the times in which we live.  Nor do I think my kids should ever see their mother’s or anyone else’s right to free speech suppressed by a person who’s supposed to love and support them.

Not in this country, ever.

And definitely not in MY home.

3:10:20 PM    comment []