state of the nation

First of all, if someone says to you, "Are you ever going to go to the bank for me?" isn't that a.) whining and b.) nagging, and don't you think that simply saying, instead, "Could you please go to the bank for me today?" would be a much more pleasant and effective way to get your ultimate goal accomplished? I mean, unless your ultimate goal is to annoy me in which case, nevermind.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's talk about some stuff. Unfortunately, I missed most of the inauguration hoopla yesterday, having a very hectic day which included work in the morning, an important meeting at my house (and frantic prep before the meeting) in the afternoon, and acupuncture in the evening, and travel between all those venues. But, like everyone else, I've got thoughts. To put in context what I'm going to ultimately get to, I'ma gonna tell you another seemingly pointless anecdote. Here goes!

After D's initial hospitalization, when he was 17-18, and after he had completely washed out on "partial hospitalization", the powers-that-be realized that they weren't gonna get the boy to sit in 6 hours of group therapy 5 days a week and the only way they were gonna make sure he was having an eye kept on him and getting therapized was to send someone to the house. Thus for a period of two or three months they set us up with "family stabilization." In practice, this meant that one afternoon a week a little tag team of two social worker/therapists came to the house. One was a sweet just-out-of-school little thing, I swear to god some kind of Mormon or born-again, fairly glowing with girl-next-door wholesomeness and earnestness. The other was an older, more experienced, very butch lesbian. It was like some kind of cliched buddy cop movie where they put two exact opposites together and somehow it works. In any case, they were both very nice women. They came to our house and spent a couple hours a week playing little games and doing little exercises with us, and it was all very benign and very useless.

But what I remember was one day we played this trivial pursuit sort of game, except the questions were all about you and what you thought and felt. (Do you *see* what I went through for my kid? Am I a good mother or what? And, also? Where do they get these things? There's got to be some kind of website like therapytoysRus.com or something.) D got a question where he had to name someone he admired, and he said P Diddy, and his reason was that he was someone who did a lot of different things (performing, producing, CEO of various businesses) and had made a lot of money with his brains and hard work and ability to order people around and get them to do what he wanted. (The surprising thing to me about that is that D, even before he got sick, was never the kind of person who had, shall we say, a lot of drive, but I guess we do admire people who possess qualities that we do not.)

Okay, so. File that piece of information aside for a moment, and let's talk about an article that was in the Sunday Globe a couple weeks ago. It was talking about people my son's generation and how there in a way was no internal barrier that most of them had to overcome to conceive of a black president. The article's hypothesis (and I think a study it was taken from) was that these young people had spent their formative years watching a media in which there was a black president on "24" and Morgan Freeman played the POTUS in the movies and, hell, Will Smith saved the Earth, if not the universe, in a new movie every year, and subconsciously they absolutely did not look at Obama and think "a president doesn't look like that" or "a leader doesn't look like that" or "a hero doesn't look like that." They looked at him as a candidate they liked (or didn't like!), not first and foremost as the black candidate. (And I'll say, personally, that I noticed that in D before I ever read any commentary about it.) The article posited that this was a double-edged sword: while it's good of course that there's no bias against, the media also influenced these kids to underestimate the amount of bias and prejudice *does* still exist. So, back to my anecdote! It's not just fictional characters influencing this. My son didn't look at P Diddy as "black guy who made good through brains and ambition and leadership ability." He just looked at him as "self-made man." He's got no conception that a black guy shouldn't be a business mogul, that it's anything to be remarked upon.

And I think that really is a generational shift. People my age (or at least me) think, "yeah, it's about time there's a black guy running things" or in the case of Hillary, "it's about time there's a woman in power," but these kids just assume why wouldn't there be? I understand the article's point about the negative, but I can't help but see it as healthy. To just blithely assume that anyone, no matter their race or ethnicity or sex, can reach any position, do any job, they're qualified for *of course*, that's good for this country. That's good for this world. It may be simplistic, but it makes me happy to see that change between my generation and my kid's.

I'd love to write more and tell more anecdotes, but someone's got to get to the bank. That deposit ain't gonna make itself, y'know.

xoxo