Zoom day

This morning was the next in the series of Class of '68 Zoom talks, and again it was really interesting.  The novelist Francine Prose, who also writes columns for The Guardian, talked about her work and how she has dealt with social issues in her fiction over the last 50 years.  There were 57 of us attending today.  I'm looking forward to next week's, though I don't yet know who will be the speaker.

In the afternoon I listened to a powerful webinar called "Naming Racism" which looked at a wide range of issues including the intersection of race and social class, the development of racist behavior in children, and the difficulty of knowing the perspective of the other in a genuine way.  It's made me think a great deal about the notion of white privilege and how I have benefited from something I've never been consciously aware of. And although I've always had Black friends, colleagues and neighbors, somehow i let myself be unaware of how truly difficult their lives could be. Then I remembered a quote from Middlemarch, a favorite novel, in which the author writes,
"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself onto the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could not bear much of it.  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence."

That unconscious fear of being overwhelmed by that roar is, for me at least, some part of the reason why keeping my distance from the painful reality of social action has always been my mode of being.  Though I lived through the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War, I never marched or carried signs.  I signed petitions and wrote letters, always at one remove from the risk of getting hurt.  Now I feel that I need to do more, but I don't know how.

This is an abstract of a photo of the ceiling fan reflected on a photograph poster of Yosemite Valley.