American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay once penned the words, "Wisdom enough... is daily spun; but there exists no loom to weave it into fabric."
Without a storyteller, many parts of history, or humanity, stay stuck as random and misconstrued, or worse still, completely unevaluated events. Fabric unwoven, disjointed, without purpose. For me, my truth is that everything IS indeed connected. Storytellers, loom-weavers, mystics who put context and texture to the facts; these are the people who inspire me.
During one of the episodes of the Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell, the narrator, explains that moral licensing is what can happen when barriers are broken. In the particular story he was speaking to, moral licensing was being specifically used with women being allowed into a "man's world." He talked about how getting "in" can be logistically impossible, and also how having one female let into the "club" didn't mean that a precedent had been set. What can happen is that people feel they have proven their own open mindedness and then feel the moral latitude to go back to a biased and narrow view. The story is exceptional, but there was a part that profoundly spoke to me. It connected a documentary I'd watched a few months back on the passing of the 19th Amendment for the right for women to vote. The connection was in a simple phrase that Elizabeth Butler Thomas (an artist) wrote in her memoirs about how she missed being elected into the Royal Academy by two votes, missed it and "rightly so." When the ratification of the 19th Amendment came down to one state assembly, in heated debates, many of the loudest voices against women voting were women themselves. So beaten down and entrenched in the dogma of their culture-- that they were lesser, that these women defended the very institution that held them in half-status. Modern psychologists might allude to Stockholm Syndrome or some such, but for me, it feels more. Deeper.
As if the very idea of facing a world where there are two choices, and the lesser of the two choices were taken, was too bleak and too dark a reality to face. So the loudest defense of the "rightness" of one is made so fervently that the quickened heartbeats and sweat brimmed brows can be ignored. How can you live in a world that chose to be so willingly cruel to you by gender, economy, religion, ethnic or any other standard unless, of course, you are wrong? Faced with that choice, then, the world itself, it's rules and regulations weren't cruel at all. That world was right. That world was just. That world has the correct answer-- it is as it is because it should be as it is.
Except...
Expect Huckleberry Finn realized his world condemned Jim and he said: "All right right then, I'll go to hell."
Except Atticus Finch sees the "justice" around him and still tells Scout: "Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
Except Reverend Msimangu sees his world and says: "But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."
Except Turner Buckminster III sees the town and it's prejudices and thought: "I almost touched a whale."
Except Jacob sees his world where the oldest is exalted and the younger forgotten, and crosses his hands and said: "I know, my son, I know."
