New Perspectives

Disney Fails US History

 While in Kentucky this vacation, I spent quite a bit of quality time with my younger cousin.  We spent time building forts and listening to music and playing tag and other such childish games.  We also watched Disney's Pocahontas.  My Uncle reminisced about how his daughter - now preparaing for college - had leaped on the couch as a child screaming "savages! savages!" when the song in the movie was sung.  My Aunt (the mother of our younger cousin) said that's silly; they were wonderful friends.

But were they?

Of course, anyone who's passed middle school history class knows that this isn't true.  However, Disney's version of events still begs a question that ought to be answered: who's the best parent, the one who allowed his child to get into the more accurate side of the movie, or the one who tries to shield her child from the evil in humanity's past?

Disney, and America should the popularity of Disney movies be taken as an accurate representation, seems to really love this idealistic world that children live in.  God knows I do; I spent all of my childhood watching their movies, and the entire ride down to Kentucky was spent listening to the Disney channel on Pandora radio (the whole 13 hours of it).  Not only do I love Disney's movies, I also have a soft spot for the themes: those of eternal love, that love conquers all, and, perhaps most famous, true-love's kiss can overcome anything.

Our children are taught from a young age to be optimistic and idealistic; they learn that love is the only thing that matters, that anyone (even "savage" natives and the British) can get along.  Therefore, when they're older and this carefully constructed reality crashes to the ground in the face of the real world, it can be shocking, traumatizing, and embittering.

Many adults who live in this world look back and miss the time when the world was simpler.  They long for the days when love was worth sacrificing anything for.  They long for the days when if it was a choice between a job and the one you care about, the choice would be simple.  They long for the days when an Indian and a Brit could look each other in the eye and fall in love.

Is it fair to do this to our children? To set them up for the fall when they realize that the world isn't the beautiful, magical place which we've taught them it is?  Which parent is better: the one who encourages her child to buy into the lie, or the one who encourages his daughter to see the true side?  Many people say that a child's innocence should be kept at all costs, but that isn't necessarily true.  Children are adults in the making, and our society encourages us to teach them to be disillusioned and ignorant, even of our own history.  What's more important: telling the truth or keeping a child's innocence?  The first is the beginning of a journey to a better society, while the second sets a person up to either live their lives in a bubble or to be ignorant for the rest of their lives.

**********

Merry Christm~ Oops.  I meant Happy Holidays.

I have a little ******* I made it out of clay
And when it's dry and ready, then ******* I shall play

It's beginning to look a lot like *********
 Ev'rywhere you go

******** oh ********
 Come light the *******

Hark! The herald ****** sing
Glory to the newborn king!

When did the holidays become so censored?  When did it suddenly become unacceptable to go up to a person and say "Hey, happy *insert your personal holiday of choice here*"?  Nowadays any mention of a religious celebration earns an awkward silence as everyone stares at you, nervously clears their throats, and wonders to themselves how you could be so damn insensitive.

I understand that people are trying to be inclusive to all religions when they say "happy holidays", but in my opinion, that line is a paranoid and insensitive over correction.  We've become so afraid of conflict that we go out of our way to be politically correct; in that process, we've lost much of the emotion and feeling that used to run through our every day conversations.  This does not show anywhere to the degree that it does in our politically correct holiday greetings.  "Happy Holidays" is far too tentative and lacks the pride and joy of a celebration which a person can call his or her own.

I'd like to take a moment to say that while I am rather irritated by "happy holidays," I am not one of those people who pickets and screams things like "Put the 'Christ' back in Christmas!"  I do not believe that you're going to hell if you don't celebrate my holiday, and I do not take it as a personal offense if you do not wish me a Merry Christmas, despite my Protestant upbringing.

If you wish me a Happy Hanukkah, you're remembering the dedication of a temple following a great victory.  How could I possibly object to that? The same with the birth of a savior, a good harvest, or the last day of prolonged darkness.  I should be pleased that you want to share your happiness with me, not offended.

The other thing that irks me about Happy Holidays is that it's meant to keep from causing cultural rifts and to help us coexist more peacefully.  It completely fails at this.  The key to getting along isn't to ignore our differences; we ought to celebrate them.  We should be able to hear "Happy Hanukkah" and if we're not Jewish, go "wow Hanukkah!? That's so cool! what do you do? how do you celebrate?"  That enthusiasm, that curiosity, is what is going to make the world a better place, not the tendency towards paranoid ignorance that we like to keep today.

 **********

North vs South

Many Americans along the east coast have a very specific, structured view of their country: North vs South.  The stereotype of a busy, liberal, elitist northerner conflicts sharply with the stereotype of a laid-back, conservative, redneck southerner.  Is this divide as set in stone as it is in our minds?  Just a quick glance at a political map, like the one shown below, seems to say yes.

I have the luck to have family down South - not very south, just Kentucky - whom I visited over vacation.  While there, my cousin (the one going to college) and I discussed some of these ideas that seem to conflict between our two cultures.  Our discussion centered around religion in our lives, gay marriage, and standardized testing; not only was I fortunate enough to get her insight to these topics, I also heard where some of her peers stood on them.  Some of the answers surprised me, some fell right into the stereotypes, and some provoked thoughts and questions about my own life and culture.

Our first topic of discussion was religion.  She attends a Catholic high school, and as one might assume, religion plays a relatively large role in her life.  However, what surprised me was that her school has a class on world religions.  It's a required course, and the students study religions from all over the world.  I'd have assumed that a course like that would be found in the North, where stereotypes dictate that the people are more open minded and would want a required course to educate their children about different religions.  However, despite all the stereotypes, it's a school in the South with this requirement.  What does that say about the supposedly liberal environment of the North? Are we really as liberal as we'd like to believe?

The discussion of religion eventually led into one of gay marriage.  This was the same as the religious discussion: some surprises, some expected answers.  My stance: that of what I perceive to be the proper liberal New Englander, or "There is nothing at all wrong with gay marriage," something I believe in with all my heart and fight for if necessary.  Hers: "Um it's ok, I guess.  I just don't find it natural."  The expected answer: reluctance, a sentiment of "it's unnatural."  The surprise: hesitance, an openness to change, and when I pointed out that being gay is natural for people who actually are gay she nodded and admitted that I was right.  So what does that mean? Does it mean she's just young, or are my conceptions of life in the South completely incorrect?

At this point, we said our goodnights and fell asleep.  In the morning we talked about the topic on the minds of every teen preparing for college: standardized tests.  What's the difference between the SAT and the ACT? Which is better?  Should I take one, or both?

And then the most important question in my mind: Do the kids in her school react with depression if they don't score well? Do they question their value as people?  Her answer was generally, no. Does that mean that Southern students don't care as much about their futures?

Then my mind wandered down a different path: is everyone in the North really like that?  Certainly some of my friends, but not even all of them.  So is it just me?

What does all of this mean?  Sure, there are some general trends; my cousin's tendency towards religion and my tendency towards perfectionism, but do those trends mean that an entire part of the country is like that?

The obvious answer is no, of course not.  It's stupid and egotistical to think that way.

So what does that mean for our carefully constructed world of stereotypes?  Put simply, they shouldn't exist.  We try to simplify our world and see it in a way that we find easy to understand, but very rarely is this the best way to view the world.  We need to do away with the stereotypes of our society and try to view the world complexly.  A society, just like a person, is more than a couple simple traits that can be summed up in a few words; there's always more than what meets the eye.  We'd do well to remember that, especially when dealing with people from our own country.

**********

So…Many…Ads…

Everywhere you look, you see ads.  They're on the sides of websites, posted along roads and train tracks, in between tv shows, sometimes even in the show itself.  My cousin, whom I've mentioned in previous posts, purchased a huge magazine of prom dresses.  That night, as the adults talked, I leafed through it.  When I reached the end, I turned to her and said "you know, you just spent ten dollars on a big book of ads."

We've become desensitized to advertisements.  They're everywhere, to the point that you really don't even notice until you look for them.  Then you realize just how many products there are to choose from, just how many sellers are being pushed at you at all times.

Very few of these ads make any sort of impression.  Many people sit through the trailers at the start of a movie, but very few of these people remember any of them.  What does our allowance of this constant stream of new products say about our society?  I believe that it communicates many things, especially when we consider that all of the people being used to sell are 

•  Famous
• Beautiful
• Or some combination of the two

This leads to the conclusion that we as a society are not happy with ourselves.  Each feels that he or she is not successful enough or pretty enough or organized enough; he or she is just not good enough.  Advertisements encourage this belief by giving us people to compare to; the ads imply – or sometimes explicitly state – that if we only buy the product, we will be successful, rich, and beautiful beyond our wildest dreams; we’re promised that any and all shortcomings will be cured.  So why do we tolerate these incessant ads, when they never deliver what they promise, and serve only to remind us of our shortcomings.  Are we all masochists who enjoy it?  Perhaps it’s because of another problem; are we all egomaniacs who enjoy the constant stream of attention?

Again, I think that the problem is a mix of many things.  There is no simple answer to how ads affect us and why we tolerate such a steady stream of them.  In order to combat the negative influence ads take on us, we must learn to be comfortable with ourselves as individuals.  Only then can we put an end to the petty waste of time and money that is advertising.

**********

Conclusion

Traveling to Kentucky has been an enlightening experience for me this year.  It's taught me things about my home that I hadn't noticed before; more importantly, it's made me question just how much of what I consider to be the culture of my home, to actually be the culture of my home and how much is just in my head, or the culture of certain parts of my home.  Because, as my mother often reminds me, the uber liberal culture of CGS is not the same as the rest of the Northeast, and the relatively liberal culture of the Northeast is vastly different from the South.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, it is important for us to remember this at all parts of our lives, from childhood to old age.  The world is more than just one cultural space; it's more than just a collection of cultural spaces existing separately.  There is so much richness everywhere, which stems from the vast differences in our cultures overlapping.

It is not helpful to stifle any cultures because we find them offensive; it is not helpful to teach our children to be ignorant of their own cultures; it is not helpful to be satisfied with dissatisfaction just because that is what our culture dictates.

This new view of my home will affect me for the rest of my life.  I’ll look at everything in a new light, and think through stereotypes about a certain people or place instead of just buying into it. 

As for which parent is better, I mean it when I say that there’s always more to a scenario than what meets the eye.  My little cousin had been very sick for a year; she’s only just now recovering, and it’s been very long and very hard.  With that in mind, is my aunt a bad mother for trying to protect her child from another harsh truth? 

If it weren’t for her child’s history, I’d say yes.  However, for a child who has been completely stripped of her youthful innocence, a mother attempting to help her baby keep just a shred of that innocence is an excellent mother indeed.

Nothing is simple, neither people nor cultural spaces.  We would do well to remember this, and embrace it.