#imaptience

I was chatting with my bestest and oldest friend--she's a week older than I and we met more or less in the early days of 1958. There's not too much we have held back and we get directly to the issues when they come up.

We more or less raised the same issue at the same moment: we are recognizing our impatience with things while becoming less judgmental. A contradiction you say? A matter of semantics?

No. We are more impatient. I certainly am. I just don't have the time to put up with silliness, with beating around the bush, with whining about one's travails and the inconveniences that make life what it is. My paper can't be delivered by breakfast because 1) the route is so long or 2) the weekly paper that day doesn't have to arrive until much later or 3) this address is at the end of the route and that's just the way the cookie crumbles?

Both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times guarantee my daily paper by 6:30 am and my weekend paper by 8:00--not that I consider 8:00 decently early. Hey, I'm paying to get the paper delivered and it's your job to get it here to me on time. I don't want your job but you apparently do want it, so just do it and qwitcherbellachin'. I'm no more forgiving in other aspects of the quotidian.

I allowed myself--stupidly and knowingly--to be drawn into an argument over Thanksgiving with an old friend of my husband. He cited an article by Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal decrying the elimination of "single author" courses for UCLA English majors in Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer. According to Rebecca Schuman in Slate magazine, the change was accompanied by new "breadth requirements that include perspectives on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, transnationalism, and—gasp—creative writing."

I listened to a tirade about what bad poets Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove are and said that I like their poetry. I pointed out that the gentleman chose to exclude singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs from his survey of folk music but that I could not imagine the 1960s and protest without that voice. He said there isn't time to teach everything. I said, precisely, that an English major also has to read deeply in the literature of the 20th and early 21st centuries in order to be a scholar and that means that less time will be devoted to the works of dead white males. 

Then the turkey had to be taken off the fire and the gravy made.

But I have so little patience with these arguments, these prejudices, these demands that Art and Truth are pure and immutable things. 

My impatience is therefore part of a tonalist vision that has only the thinnest slivers of pure white and velvet black amid a sea of grays from silver and pewter to ash and charcoal. Although I was told my youthful liberalism would move to a more rigid conservatism, I have found that not to be the case. I need more information, more time to muse. How do I feel about the uproar after so many white police have shot and killed young black men? I feel that the anger and discouragement and paranoia need acknowledgement and consideration. I think that privileged white people like myself need to take a step back and think about how assumptions and attitudes--a sense of "Truth"--is a malleable, subject, and deeply ingrained thing.

Tonight I listened to an argument that torture inflicted by the CIA and its contractors on suspected terrorists was okay, even though torture is a bad thing, because it produced significant amounts of reliable intelligence that kept America safe. Is torture ever okay? I just don't know. But I know that any information elicited from people whose only goal is to get the pain to stop is dubious. I would be far less concerned in revealing "truth" than I would be in telling my torturer what he wants to hear.

Jenna Anne- Impatience

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