This is my second post for the day. Scroll down to read about fear.
These are serious times at the Hippo. I want to be lighthearted and carefree, but I create and respond to excess drama. I want to be zen-like and calm, but my mind generates chaos.
I’m thinking about my brother Mike, whom I’ve hurt, and who has hurt me. I have four younger brothers, and in the pandemonium of our upbringing, my highest aspiration was to be an only child. Later, when I could appreciate him more, I would amend that to a wish that my parents had discovered birth control after my next-youngest brother was born.
That would have left me and Mike.
Mike is my younger brother, but there are ways in which I was always jealous of him. In the angst-soaked days of my adolescence, he was the athletic, adventurous one to whom people naturally gravitated: the natural choice for my parents’ favorite. Later, as my priorities changed, I realized he was also the worldliest and most easy-going of us all. He has a good time wherever he is, he has patience for humanity in general, and at least one of my boyfriends made a point of telling me how physically attractive he found my next-youngest brother.
In other words, Mike is the antiDavid; contrary to what one might expect, and despite some pretty terrible fights while we were growing up, as adults we have always been good friends. Outside of a cramped house, my jealousy transformed into real admiration, and he must have seen something redeeming in me, as well. Perhaps I’m the one who helped inspire him to be so accepting of people who are different from him. I took him to his first gay club, an experience he fled not because he was getting hit on (he was), but because he has a pathological fear of dancing. We also came of voting age at the same time and voted for Bill Clinton together, celebrating together when he won the presidency in 1992 (I was disenchanted with Clinton by 1996 but voted for him again anyway). At the polls in the local elementary school, Mike asked for my opinions on the issues and voted accordingly, trusting correctly that I would never steer him wrong.
Wednesday night was D-Day. Perhaps I made too big a deal of what happened: I ran home and wrote it down because I couldn’t articulate anything out loud. Writing is how I think, but I could barely think, flabbergasted by what I saw as a betrayal of my core ideals of truth, justice, peace, logic, and life. He probably felt the same, that I would react the way I did when he went out of his way to articulate his social liberalism, his support of gay rights and other causes we have in common.
Mike is a photojournalist and a damned good one. He witnessed the collapse of the World Trade Center and was left with impressions I can’t begin to imagine. Perhaps this and his faith in the news media he works for have made him more susceptible to the Big Lie. Such speculation on my part would infuriate him, but I’m grasping at straws, trying to make sense of something that I simply can’t accept.
The one thing I’ve tried to make clear is that it was not the ideas that horrified me so. People have the right to think what they want (although the world would be a much better place of they drew conclusions based upon actual facts). No, my reaction was to the person who espoused those ideas . . . someone I love and always had (and still have) a tremendously high opinion of. Though I stand by what I wrote as an accurate record of my feelings, I realize I didn’t provide a picture of the full human being. I’m sorry that people who have as a group been persecuted beyond endurance for the past few years didn’t have a more perfect description on which to comment and express their very understandable frustration.
