OCTOBER 2023 SULLYGRAM  So, who are you going to be for Halloween? What costume or mask will you be wearing? For that matter, what costume do you wear when it’s not Halloween? What’s your identity, your chosen tribe?

Catchy word, tribe. Trendy concept. Lots to choose from – family, neighborhood, geographical boundary, race, religion, gender, politics, a sport, a job, a bar, a club, social media, old friends, new friends…? Me, I’m freer than most. Reluctant to bond with anything. Not the least anti-social, though. Fear of rejection, then? Not really. The world has been kind to me. I think it’s partly the wanderlust of living in a dozen countries in the first six years of my life and partly a rogue gene that only lights up in the rare ether of the romantically ideal.

That said, the passage of time leaves me dismayed at the rapid-fire changes to life itself. Anyone who caught a good chunk of the 20^th Century can say the same, I suppose. Come with me, if you like, and I’ll retrace something I mentioned in a FB post after a late-night drive early last summer: 

Somewhere south of midnight the night began to feel like a time machine, so I let it lead me out of the town I was driving through and a few decades down country roads. The golden moon was still storybook gorgeous, but it was the smell of ripening fields on cool nocturnal air that triggered the memories – deep childhood memories from play in foxholes and alleys and fields.

Remembered my mom putting clothes through a worn ringer above the laundry tub. No doubt she felt quite modern, having grown up in an age where you stuck a scrub board in a bucket, grabbed a bar of lye soap, and had at it with each separate item. It was pretty standard to get your hand caught in that ringer at least once, and I was no exception. Clotheslines inside; clotheslines out. Did we really live like that not so long ago?

Houses had coal chutes and milk chutes for deliveries. I shoveled coal into a furnace in Detroit and again in Bay City, helping my friend George Rogers, who lived in a lumber baron mansion which had remnants of an electric car charger in the garage from the early 1900s. I recall seeing an ice wagon deliver blocks of ice to a couple old houses when we lived in Detroit. I slept in an unheated attic in Dearborn for my junior year of high school and hated getting out of bed in the morning and scraping the frost off the inside of the window with my fingernails to see out. Sounds Dickensian now, but I lived a charmed life. No cell phones back then, no Internet to wrestle control of life away from me. Made a tiny basketball hoop with a coat hanger and string for a net and shot baskets with a ping pong ball to keep warm. Drank a swig of Faygo black cherry pop each time I made three baskets in a row (must have cheated, else I would have died of thirst).

Childhood summers in a half-finished cottage near Pontiac were paradise. The “Gypsy Camp” my cousin called it, complete with a badly tuned piano that sounded to me like a Steinway. And nightly bonfires. All very close to nature (and nature was coming up through the floor boards). Essentially two rooms, not counting a curtained cubby hole with a “thunder mug.” The thunder mug was because you didn’t want to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night with all the mosquitoes and saber-tooth tigers in the woods of Elizabeth Lake near Keego Harbor, Michigan. But that enameled chamber pot had wonderful acoustics, and you could tell who was using it by the rim shots.

We walked everywhere. Summer, winter – walked. Much of the world still does, and not just the poorer countries. When I spoke at the House of Literature in Oslo a few years ago, I was amazed at the activity level of Norwegians (“oh, we can walk…it’s just up the hill”). And “up the hill” was often half a mile. Axiomatically in those green years of my youth, there were few spectatorships. No pixel screens and “cells.” We created our own magic. 

By contrast, basic living is so easy these days that we’ve switched focus from tangible tasks to intangible screen-time, from the physical to the emotional, from doing to feeling. We follow the bouncing ball of social messaging to awaken sensitivity rather than attending what were once time-consuming practical needs. Besides making us sedentary and increasingly obese, has it taken a toll on our resourceful and independent problem-solving nature? No doubt a genuine need is served by seeking out truly disadvantaged people, but what happens to a society at large when its strengths and merits are demonized and helpless victimization becomes heroic? Does it indoctrinate succeeding generations with a kind of neurotic weakness, angst, fragility and hysteria over often imagined victimizations? Does it devitalize the very strengths it needs to survive and thrive? 

Our handicaps are often voluntary – drugs, alcohol, sedentary obesity, and addictions like social media, texting and gaming. We’ve become memes and avatars in a feckless search for purpose and meaning. Even suicide can be a giant tantrum, a protest because we lack the “sticks and stones will break my bones/but names will never hurt me” mentality against bullying that strengthened former generations and gave them coping skills to become resilient adults. We ban dodge ball, UNcompete for participation trophies so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings, and use glad hands instead of clapping to keep the deaf from being offended. We demonize competition, merit, and individuality (“it takes a village”). Whereas we once celebrated our diversity for its melting pot assets, we now weaponize, politicize and polarize it for its deficits.

Our national unity formerly came from shared ethics like hard work, responsibility, the rule of law, and the freedom to pursue our individual destinies. National unity doesn’t threaten cultural pride in some other tribal identity. But neither should cultural identities threaten national unity. If you continue to live here, you have chosen a country founded on individual freedoms and opportunities, not guaranteed outcomes from a government that tells you how to live. In the end, your personal tribe has less to do with your race, nationality, gender, ID politics, sexual orientation, faith and the rest of it. Your personal tribe is the people who discover you like a scrap of paper fluttering down the street and for whatever reason feel compelled to read what’s written thereon. If we don’t awaken from wokeness pretty soon, AI or alien invasion can’t come soon enough. Thanks for reading. Be well, be kind, be strong.

A few photos below…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan