Saturday, January 10, 2009

a new kind of clown

last night, on a whim, my former roommate and i snagged tickets for "to kill a mockingbird" at the edison theater on wash u's campus. "to kill a mockingbird" is one of the great classics that i have never read. after seeing last night, i'm not sure why, and am somewhat saddened that no teacher or professor ever required it of me. atticus (the lawyer and father) tells his children to walk in the shoes of others, and i found myself transported from my seat in a theater to the little town of macom in 1935. i felt the fear and hatred that swelled in the heat of the summer. i wanted to hug atticus; to express how proud i was of him. tears of defeat rolled down my face, and my fists were sometimes clenched in anger.

i think there's just one kind of folks. folks. - Scout

the one pair of shoes i struggle to put on, even for a moment , are those of the angry mob. of the people that hated just because of skin color. quite honestly, of those that hated in general. i don't really know how to hate or maybe i just get all of my hatred out on fish and mushrooms. in all honesty, i've probably just never been provoked enough to hate. i can't pretend to understand the slave traders or hitler or the hatred behind the civil wars in africa or the guy down on etzel that shoots the other guy for being friends with the wrong people. in my mind and in my heart, people are people. folks are folks. they are affected greatly by what comes with their skin color, gender, religion, language, etc. it's important to include those characteristics when considering a person, but in a wholistic way without judgement and certainly without seething contempt.

They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. -Atticus

sometimes i wonder if we can really affect change large enough to make a true difference. at some point enough countries got together and stopped the massacre of WWII, men of courage stepped up and said "folks are folks" and slavery is wrong, and people who believed in the power of hope and something greater than themselves moved to etzel.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. -Atticus

as i write there is a group from the jewish community down the street protesting the upheavel in israel. a group of about fifty on a very public strip in a city in the middle of the midwest. will their voices really be heard? about one block from them is another group of people, masked and carrying signs against the church of scientology. will their presence saturday after saturday have any effect?

sometimes i just don't think it's enough and i want to crawl in bed, pull the covers over my head, and forget about war, a crashing economy, the drug deals down the street, the neighbors that got robbed.

"I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks."

my soul longs to be an atticus, and maybe i will be on a small scale. an atticus to one person. but i guarantee that there will be days where hope will seem just slightly out of reach, and i'll picture myself, just briefly, as a new kind of clown standing in the middle the ring, laughing. laughing.




1 comment:

montyhobson said...

amanda,
welcome to the crossing!

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