Some Other Things It's All Right to Be

Years ago, when a sponsor's offspring was using the small size of this web site as an argument against the person's continued sponsorship of it, this web site affirmed Alan Jackson's pronouncement that it's all right to be little-bitty. 

There is no explaining the popularity of some small niche blogs. John Horvath had a blog about traditional Catholic practices that grew into a social forum. Suzette Haden Elgin had one about linguistics. A blogger known as Motus had one that started out with a focus on Michelle Obama's fashion mistakes. In theory a blog that's mostly about old books could have grown into a social forum, but so far that's not happened. But even when small niche blogs become places where people form the kind of e-friendships that grow into real-world friendships, their daily readership is still only a few hundred people, say two thousand at most; they don't command the market reach of the New York Times. Maintaining a small niche blog as a social forum is something people do for fun. Such a blog may be well sponsored (really unusual poems at Elizabeth Barrette's blog sell for over $300) but it's not a way anybody is ever going to get rich quick. So it's better for a niche blog to maintain its integrity than to try to commercialize itself.

Last week, watching e-friends interact a blog that's grown into a social media forum, I was struck by the support people were giving someone's adopting a new dog. Person was well along in middle age and had hesitated to replace the dog that died of old age. Person had mourned, on that forum. E-friends had mourned with person and shared person's emotional journey to being ready to offer a home to a new, different dog. Planning the road trip on which the dog was going to be picked up, the person said, "We are over the moon! And possibly slightly crazy." An e-friend who'd been exchanging comments with person daily promptly replied, "That's all right!" 

This provoked some thoughts about some other situations in which the position of this web site is that it's all right to be more emotional than some people in my town are willing to be, or let others be, In Public. If you feel that your thoughts are scattered randomly about by your emotions like a piece of "crazy" patchwork or brickwork or beadwork or mosaic tiles, it's all right to describe your mood as "crazy," which does seem to be the preferred word in some genres of pop music, not used in an abusive way at all. This web site generally avoids words that a computer algorithm is likely to pick up as mere verbal abuse.

It's all right (with me, anyway) to be intensely cheerful, perky, energetic, and even joyous, just because you are young and healthy. Not to the extent that your happy dances intrude into other people's personal space, but it's fine to sing just because you know a good song.

It's all right to be ecstatic when your child, or grandchild, or foster child, comes out of any hospital where the child has been for any reason--birth, or anything that comes after. Not to the extent of driving recklessly, but if you are from Tennessee and have heavy window tinting on your car and forget to peel it off before crossing the state line into Virginia, the way a local newspaper columnist did recently, the position of this web site is that the Virginia police should empathize with your ecstatic feelings and send you on your way, apologizing for having taken up enough of your time to peel the plastic off the windows.

It's all right to be soppy and sentimental about relatives you don't see every day any more. 

It's all right to cry real tears if, e.g., the "girl" who used to be your baby-sitter is now in a retirement home, and all of her immediate family are already dead, and due to her desperate loneliness you are the person she calls to talk to on the night before a dangerous surgical operation, and due to COVID-phobia you can't go in and reminisce and distract her from worrying about the operation, one last time. 

It's all right, even for big strong men, not only to shed tears but to bawl out loud when people die young. Even if they were only public figures whom the people crying did not actually know. The day Davey Allison died, Dale Earnhardt (senior), the quintessential supermacho redneck, cried real tears, and there was nothing at all unmanly about that. 

It's better style to crack jokes about it when you are in physical pain and danger, but it's not obligatory. We cannot all be Ronald Reagan. If tears of pain come to your eyes and other people feel uncomfortable with that, that is because they shouldn't have been looking.

It's all right to laugh, possibly even in a raucous and unladylike manner, at people (male or female) who cry when nobody's died and nobody's in a terribly sad situation and the person crying isn't in pain, but the person crying is not getting what person wanted, probably as a direct result of person's own carelessness or impatience or stupidity. But let's keep our language clear about this. A big strong man once arrived on my doorstep about 11:30 p.m., after my flatmate and I had given up on him and were trying to get to sleep, crying real tears because he had failed to allow time for D.C. rush-hour traffic, had missed his dinner date with me, and was now tired and hungry. That kind of crying is not effeminate in a man. It is infantile. It would be infantile in a woman, too.

It's all right to say something that does not express peace, joy, or Christian love if you miss a nail and hammer your thumb, though if you habitually condemn the souls of things that don't have souls and judge the sex lives of things that don't have sexes, I reserve the right to laugh at that. 

It's all right to be more concerned about "evil speaking" than I am if you are Jewish rather than Irish. In some ways "Mike and Ike think alike" and in some ways they don't. In Irish culture venting anger with a serious curse is an art form. In Jewish culture it's a sin. If you are a person who really tries to avoid "evil speaking" about anybody, consistently, on your own blog it's acceptable to try to squelch it here. (If you are a person who apparently thinks it's all right for you to express anger and pass judgment, because you are fully human, but it's not all right for other people to do those things, because in your mind we are not as fully human as you are, at this web site it's all right to mock you without mercy.)

It's all right to be sarcastic in a hostile, horn-locking way if you're quite sure that there's no hope of ever being able to communicate with the person you're snarking about. At some partisan political web sites there's a rule that members of the other party aren't going to read anything for their own edification, so they are routinely referred to by snarky kindergarten-type nicknames. At this web site the rule is that we take sides on issues not people, and try when possible to discuss issues in ways that may educate the people who need such education most. So, maybe you voted against the current President, but if by chance a bolt of revelation drives him to the Internet in search of honest explanations of why you don't support the bad ideas he's been supporting, this web site prefers to explain that kind of thing with due courtesy to President Biden, not "Bidet" or "Bidumb." This web site did abandon all hope for a former governor we call Tacky or Terribly McAwful, but we don't normally do that kind of thing. And if we think some elected officials were right several years ago when they said they were too old for the position someone has since talked them into occupying, we express that thought in the way we want others to express it if we become unfit to do a job we still enjoy.

It's all right to be genuinely afraid of coronavirus, strep, measles, flu, or mold. No questions will be asked about whether you or someone close to you has the immune system disorder. If we ever have lunch with you at our favorite cafe, we will sit six feet away from you.

It's all right to be genuinely impatient with artificial coronavirus panic, which seems like a way for control freaks to interfere with our lives because it is one. 

It's all right to call out the inconsistencies you see in people's observance of new rules intended to promote public health, as when you go into a restaurant with a robust immune system and no felt need to see the servers wearing masks, but they are, but then you see a masked employee go directly from handling your money, with bare hands, to handling your food or dishes, with the same bare hands, not washing the hands in between. That is ridiculous. And disgusting. 

It's all right, although some people have valid reasons not to do it, to call out that sort of thing when you see it in the health care field, too. Doctors and nurses, young healthy people with robust immune systems, don't feel a need to wash their hands after touching a patient who has pneumonia. Their skin is already too dry. So, three days later every other patient in the hospital has pneumonia. "Oh well, antibiotics all round"--but the instructions on the packet of antibiotics clearly say that the drug may cause cramps painful enough to break a sick patient's bones. People who go into the health care professions need to be very clear on this. It's better for you to have dry, chapped, ashy-looking skin than for your patients to have muscle cramps that break their bones. Wash those hands!

It's all right to snub pushy extrovert behavior, not out of ill will, but just because you don't choose to encourage that behavior. Christian good will has nothing to do with displaying your teeth, or rewarding idle chatter that interrupts useful work or thought or conversation, or indulging control freaks in their pathological behavior. If the extroverts around us really want to feel that we "like" them or approve of them, they can always learn to back off and show some healthy respect.

It's all right to lament the passing of the Queen of England, though this web site has already done that, and to note the extent to which what people admired and miss about her most was her gracious, but reserved, good manners...the manners that come naturally when introverts are feeling and practicing good will, that are formally taught to the young in societies with a proper respect for introverts. Why should we let those manners die? Actually, we shouldn't.

It would be all right to empathize with the feelings of all the poor extroverts out there who will have to learn, as extroverts had to learn everywhere before the twentieth century, to subdue that urge to grab for the attention of everyone they see...if, and whenever, our society returns to a solid consensus that the urge must be subdued. If and when extroverts are taught to ask people to lend them attention in the same subdued and apologetic way they'd ask people to lend them money, then it might make sense to feel that an occasional indulgence is an act of kindness.

It's all right to feel glad, proud, and grateful for the gift of an introvert brain, while bearing in mind that we did not create our introvert brains ourselves.

It's all right to feel emotionally attached to places and people we know, and to feel only a vague, abstract, general good will toward places and people we don't know. Why people would ever feel embarrassed by loving their country, "when wrong to be put right," I don't want to try to understand.

(It's all right, if your country is one of the United States, to identify with your State rather than with the whole U.S. of A., even if Europeans don't understand the feeling. One can understand why Europeans might be annoyed by it since they may not recognize the names of the States...but the original idea of "a sovereign Union of sovereign States" was that each State, like each European nation, could have its own laws and culture. Our States are the size of European nations. One of them is our home, or, in the cases of medium to large-sized States, contains our home. The others are friendly but somewhat foreign countries. Thus we say "I'm American, from Wyoming" for the same reasons Europeans say "I'm Italian," or if they've found that people don't have a clear sense of where to find their country on a map, "I'm European, from Luxembourg.")

It's all right to feel emotionally attached to your own religious tradition, also. In fact this web site would probably find it easier to respect the way some people feel about Humanist and Socialist beliefs if those people would admit, as Barbara Ehrenreich did, that what they feel about their beliefs is what they have for a religious tradition. There is still a crucial difference. That the universe was specially and lovingly created by a fatherly God Who wants to be known and loved by us may be hard to prove, but it's not possible to disprove, either. That Socialism has made every nation that's ever tried it poorer, with only slight variations depending on how well off the nation was at the beginning and how many Socialist schemes were tried, is a fact. That people still think they want Socialism is, therefore, evidence in support of the claim that they are emotionally attached to Socialism in a religious rather than rational way. 

It's all right, and in fact it's the natural right of all grandparents, to believe that your own grandchildren are absolutely the cutest, cleverest, most charming children that have ever been born. Another grandparent might argue with you about that, but I'm an aunt. Aunts are more impartial. We observe that all children are adorable and all grandparents are wired to feel that their own grandchildren are especially adorable. Adorableness is a subjective quality. So of course, in their subjective way, all the grandparents are right, and none of them gets any argument from me.

Similarly all people in their late teens and twenties are wired to believe that some person whose pheromones affect their hormones in what they find a fascinating way is a fascinating person. Most people in their fifties, who are less susceptible to young people's pheromones, may not be hard-wired but are at least predisposed to believe that the people who fascinate our young relatives might have been, with a little more training and discipline, made fit for our young relatives to wipe their boots on. We can try to agree to disagree, and leave one another alone. Fathers traditionally have the job of torture-testing young people's admiration for one another. This aunt is not interested in taking over that job. If anything happens to any of The Nephews' fathers they will just have to try to scrape up the money to get their lawyers to investigate their admirers. I am too tired. The thought of this necessary stage in the history of any family is making me so tired that I had better stop writing and turn in for the night.