Letters to the Editor
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you can't go home again, but do you really want to?
I commute for my out-of-town teaching job and actually spend two nights a week with my mother and stepfather. Fox is their TV channel of choice. Limbaugh is in their kitchen and their bathrooms, their cars. But if you think this is torture for this college instructor, imagine this: If Fox isn't tuned in, then Trinity Broadcasting Network is.
My mother was distressed that one of her Wednesday night TBN "prophecy" shows had apparently been suspended. (These shows review current events to prove that apocalypse is edging ever closer. The return of Christ, the rapture, the Tribulation, and eternal damnation for non Christians virtually within sight) I was rushing out the door for my night class when she ran to me, literally wringing her hands: "Hal Lindsey's Intelligence Briefing isn't on again! What's going on?"
I love my mother. I hate her politics and her religion, but I love my mother. I promised to do some internet research that night when I returned from school. "We'll find out why it's not on, Mom," I assured her. "Don't worry."
I spent the next three hours instructing my night students in composition theory, ethos, logos, pathos and the power of rhetoric. Then I trotted back to my Mother and stepfather's pleasant ranch in the nicest neighborhood in town. I hung up my coat and rolled up my sleeves and sat down at the computer. Soon I had discovered that Trinity was suspending Hal Lindsey's show, according to Hal Lindsey, because he was pro-Israeli and anti-Muslim.
As I read this aloud to Mom, she was indignant. Of course Hal Lindsey was pro-Israeli and anti-Muslim--the Bible was, too! Oh, those liberals at TBN, being politically correct! Her blood pressure, mostly dangerously high, was surely getting higher. "Don't worry, Mom," I said again. "You can write TBN a letter and tell them that. Be an activist! Let your voice be heard."
"Will you do it?" she asked. "Will you write them a letter and tell them how upset we are about their politically correct, anti-Israeli policies?"
Oh, reader. Can I admit this in anonymous cyberspace? The next day, I sat in my book-lined office at a public institution where I am an assistant professor and I pulled up the Trinity Broadcasting Network website. I clicked the Contact Us icon. I began to compose a letter in which I said something like: We want to protest Hal Lindsey being removed from the air. We think his positions are Biblical..."
It was at that moment that I caught myself. My God. What was the matter with me? How could I compromise my integrity, my belief system, my values, my lack of religion, all for the immature and neurotic need for my mother's approval,a woman with a tenth grade education and a King James Bible and a world view so shrunken and bigoted that I blush in shame... this woman's approval has driven me for my entire life.
I am happy to say, I powered down my computer in the middle of this letter. I was humiliated and surprised that I had almost completely sold out. I know how hateful and divisive the radically right can be, but tiptoeing around them will not accomplish anything. We have to be at least as bold as they are in asserting values. Would my mother have stroked out if I said, "I am not writing any bullshit letter to protest the suspension of your bullshit prophecy show"? Probably not. And I know that swallowing all the poisonous diatribe I hear firsthand and recycled is not doing my blood pressure any good.
I agree that along with reasonable and measured responses to the rightwingers in one's life, humor is a great resource. When my seventy-year-old mom watches George Bush speak on television, she actually melts. Her face glows. She says, with as much passion as I've ever heard from her, "I love that man."
You can only laugh(in private). You laugh until you cry (in private).