MARTHA THOMASES: Last Man Standing
When I was a teenager, the environment of my hometown became poisonous. To save me, my parents sent me to an alien environment that seemed to be a universe away, filled with people so different from me they might have been a different species altogether. No one knew anything about my home, nor about my people’s civilization and customs. Instead, I had to hide my true self until I understood how I fit in and what I had to offer the strangers with whom I lived.
No, I’m not Supergirl. I understand how you could be confused, because the resemblance is striking. However, I did find myself in a similar situation to Kara Zor-El. Instead of being a Kryptonian from Argo City sent in a rocket ship to Earth, I was a Jew from Ohio sent to an Episcopalian boarding school in Connecticut. Instead of being part of the majority as I was at my public school in Youngstown (there were so few kids in class during the High Holy Days that they could bring comics to school!), I had to go to chapel five times a week while the priest swung incense.
Many of my classmates had never seen a Jew before. Others, more worldly, would say things to me like, “You’re from Ohio? I have a friend in Wyoming. Do you know her?” For the first time in my life, I wasn’t part of the majority culture. I learned what it was like to be a minority.
There’s a lot to be learned from the majority culture. Not the least of it is learning where you, as a minority, fit in. You learn your place. You learn how to get by. You learn another point of view, that of the majority. That’s what taught in school. That’s what you see on television and in movies.
If you’re lucky, you take your experience as a minority and use it to understand how other minorities feel. You know what it’s like to be on the outside, looking in. In my case, as a Midwestern Jew, I could imagine how it would feel to be African-American, or gay, or Asian. I could take my own experience as a minority to imagine the experience of people who were other kinds of minorities.
Fiction helps. For example, when I read Amy Tan’s The Joy-Luck Club, I read about a society where, no matter what you did for your parents, it wasn’t enough, and that it was more important in a marriage to find a husband with money than with imagination. I was convinced that being Chinese felt just like being Jewish.
Comics help even more, if only because they are produced more quickly than novels. In The Legion of Super-Heroes, we can see how Chameleon can shape change to fit in – but chooses not to. Princess Projectra tried to hide her snake form at first, but learned to exult in it. The theme of three X-Men movies has been a metaphor for the dangers of the closet, of hiding your true self to pass for straight or, in this case, non-mutant.
Once a week, I volunteer in the pediatric department of a local hospital. I teach knitting to kids and caregivers. I’d like to say I do this because I’m a spiritual person, more evolved than you – better, in fact – but that’s not true. I do it because it’s the best part of my week, and whatever problems I might have in my adult life disappear when I spend a few hours with these kids. It gives me a chance to talk about color and texture and sheep instead of war and money and politics.
There is hardly anything more annoying than listening to a bunch of us Baby Boomers talking about the good old days: the music, the sex, the drugs, the sit-ins and be-ins and love-ins, even the comics. We act like we invented rebellion, and we don’t think anyone else will ever care about the world as much as we did, and certainly no one else will make changes as important as the ones we made.
The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”
