I've been thinking about identity a lot lately. Identity and some other rambling things.
Culture has undergone a sea change even since I was child in a geek household. The range of what's acceptable - what's understood to be more than a hobby, like a TV show or books, or model rockets - has expanded massively. As we've become exposed to new ideas, we become aware that we're not alone, that we're not strange, and even that we're not alone in our fear. That we are not suffering alone.
But we've also started waking up to the idea that Mom and Dad aren't ever going to be okay, that praying to God isn't going to do anything about the starving children in Zimbabwe. And if you're brave and stupid enough, you'll leave your comfortable American neighborhoods and your creature comforts and go be a privileged white boy in Zimbabwe. You'll drink beer and smoke weed and come back with the assumed wisdom that comes from being a stranger in a strange land.
Privilege. There's another one. We've gotten aware enough of the world around us that we've begun to realize that our perspectives come with inherent bias. Depression or resignation becomes stagnancy, resistance to the outside world. Or we become inured and find our own ways to cope. Or to help.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I myself am a privileged girl, close enough to what one would call Caucasian that I might be called white instead of Latina. My family has been middle class, which in this country means we have always had power, we have always had running water. We have always had, if not caviar, then food, relatively fresh and probably (mostly) clear) of nasty pollutants. We have never been without a computer.
We never left the country, but then again, we've never wanted for books, for libraries, for safe cities to roam with low chances of being shot. When we were sick, doctors, if not over the counter packages, would solve our problems.
This world is a sick one, where this can be considered anything less than paradise. And yet.