Inauguralistic fixation

How many whose eyes were focused on the inauguration also listened? felt? truly cared? or was it just something to say "I was there" or "I watched it on TV" or just spent the moment as "something to do"?

I'd never watched an inauguration before. This one? One of those moments in history it's hard to believe actually took place. Born in the '30s, I remember raw racism. I remember wanting to play with the child my mother's "maid" brought with her, but being told "no". I remember stores' restrooms plainly marked "White only." I remember being told to say "white lady" and "negro woman" because "lady" could never be used to refer to "them".

Yes, racism reigned, even in the conversations, when attitudes were assumed shared (an unspoken "you're white, so you must share my prejudice"). I remember the boil inside when the "N" word was freely tossed about, and my protests which fell on jeering ears. I did all the stupid "honky" things trying to help, like insisting Eva, the "maid" sit at the table with us (embarrassed her profoundly, oblivious me). I remember wondering why there were no people of color at the coastal beaches; why "yard men" were to be met only at the back door; why "back of the bus" was "their place"; that "knowing their place" had any significance at all? And later, how that applied as well, to being a woman, knowing "her place". Racism was twin to sexism. Racial bias trumped gender bias. Or was it the other way around?

College at a Baptist school in Texas allowed no color, and some of the professors (1950's) swore "I'll resign if they ever let them (blacks) into this school." Christian school, Christian professors, mind you. Later, as I taught school, I overheard students say they were going "nigger nockin'" on the way home. All this before schools were integrated.

I remember the dangers of protest. How in Waco, Texas, the effort to join black friends in church meetings, gospel-music singing with a particular enthusiast friend met with her parent's bleak fear of the realities -- how being seen with anyone white, in a car with anyone white endangered her life. Our hope of the beauteous blend of our mellow voices was forever dashed, because of fear and its realities.

How difficult it was to be trusted as a whitey who meant friendship rather than ill intent. How efforts to train up my own children to drop prejudices in a super-saturated prejudicial world. How it felt to be insulted when opening my home to "them". How demonstrative it became (and almost felt false) to go to the newly integrated town pool as the only white venturers to dare "mixing" in the same water. Yet, looking back, how glad I was to have taken that baby step, ...that baby step and others. How limited my own understanding was, still is. How blind are we to the earmarks of those annoying little seams that connect one prejudice to another; how strong the threads; how durable, despite our efforts to obliterate them.

If nothing else, I watched those who belittled me and mine (for our efforts to forget racial differences and become blind to color) suddenly find it "OKAY" to get on a political bandwagon. I watched, and wondered what they had forgotten in their new-found flag-waving, what they had put aside, what memories they had stuffed away. Was it guilt? Or just another means to grab attention?

I voted. After, and only after Mrs. Clinton was out of the running, my vote went to Mr. Obama. My vote had
nothing to do with color.

Yet, as I watched this momentous ceremony -- momentous because of its differences, however similar the testosteronics still are -- I knew there resided a mini-kernel of hope, somewhere, somehow, for those of us who care about fairness catching up with fact, reality becoming inclusive of ALL -- even gender-wise. For, however long it may take, the last frontier (being female) may become more than a dot on the horizon of hope.

Took us long enough to recognize racism. Will sexism ever be admitted? Or is it so deeply embedded in the societal hard drive it can not only never be extracted, but will never ever even be detected for what it is?

Like ageism, sexism, I fear, is here to stay. And few will have ever noticed either had true validity. Few will ever know the symptoms. Like some acceptable disease, one wonders about a cure. Is it not first necessary to recognize a sickness prior to seeking treatment? The insidious symptoms, like rashes, come and go in so many shapes and forms.

So do we, as when oblivious, return to "some of my best friends are. . . ." ? The only answer, I believe, is to continuously seek to evolve, grow, change, learn, seek to know,
and in so doing, so do.

Yes, we are ever at the threshold, if we are alive, that is.