More Light!: Plaidder's 2001st Post - Democratic Underground

Plaid Adder

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Fri Dec-19-03 02:51 AM
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More Light!: Plaidder's 2001st Post

If I've counted right, this one should put me over the 2000 mark, so I thought I'd try to make it a good one.

Why am I posting on DU at 1:30 in the morning? Because I have finally crawled out of grading hell. I teach, and I have just finished grading a huge load of student papers. As grueling as that is, there were a couple things about it that made me feel better than I have for a while.

In one of my classes we have been reading a lot of stuff that was written a long time ago that deals with violence. In their papers, a lot of my students are starting to talk about how at first everyone was all gung-ho about the war after 9/11 but now they understand how much it costs and people are turning against it. Some of them include anti-war rhetoric that you'd think you would only hear at a Green party rally. Now it's entirely possible that they have shrewdly divined my opposition to the war (I try to conceal my politics as much as possible in the classroom, but it's never going to be 100% successful) and giving me what they know I want. I'm constantly amazed at how good students get at doing that. But it is also possible that this is how they really feel; and in any event, it shows that they have at least been exposed to the message. I was particularly encouraged that one of my more conservative-seeming students brought a fairly critical analysis of the oil motives for the Iraq war into his paper. He was discussing it as if he wanted to distance himself from it, but at least he's read it.

You get up every day and go in there and you have no idea whether you're doing anyone any good. I feel the same way about all the writing I do on the web; you throw it all out there and most of the time you never hear back. For all you know, you could achieve the same effect by sticking your head down a drainpipe and yodeling. But today I was starting to wonder if there really is a shift in public opinion about the war, and maybe we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Outside our window there's a tree with very beautiful branches which is of course totally bare right now. Usually our one concession to the orgy of Christmas decoration that surrounds us is to put lights on that tree. This year, what with everything, I haven't felt much like doing most of my Christmas stuff. But today I went out and strung the tree with a few hundred of those little white lights. I put up the strands we normally put up, and went down to the street to look at it, and decided I wanted more lights. So I kept stringing them along the branches until I was all out of little white bulbs, and I finally felt like I had enough light.

I bought some little presents, too, for my neighbors; the people across the street from us who lost their son in October, the couple next door to them where the woman told me the other day that one of her best friends' sons hanged himself two days after Thanksgiving. The hardest thing about this time of year is the relentless push to be happy, despite everything happening around you. In America, as I was telling my partner tonight, it's so hard to opt out of things; the machinery of the media and advertising is so overwhelming that you feel obliged to celebrate whether you want to or not. I don't know whether getting an ornament in a box really makes you feel any better when you're still mourning the loss of your son, but I figured it was worth a shot.

My partner was really excited about the tree when she came home, as I knew she would be. There is a very horrible line in a terribly cheesy lesbian movie called *Desert Hearts* in which one of the characters says, "She reached in an put a string of lights around my heart." As bad as that line is, it is true that when I was standing out in the street looking at the tree with its lights I was thinking that it is what she makes me feel like, all lit up and waiting for her to come home. And I was trying to remember who it was whose last words were supposed to be "More light!"

I went to a college whose motto was "Light and truth." It's a good motto. Having been through the same school hasn't done Dubya any good, of course; but I keep hoping that someday light and truth will come knocking on Dubya's door and demand their payback. Things are dark enough these days, it's easy to forget that they have been this dark before and gotten better. I was saying to our neighbor with the friend whose son committed suicide that I think it's just hard for people to remember, when they're that miserable, that these things don't last forever. The night can last a long fucking time, but it usually turns out not to be the end of the world, and the sun does come up.

So that's my wish for 2004: more light. Hope we get it.

Happy holidays,

The Plaid Adder