Monday, January 21, 2013

Leaving Some Things In The Past

One of my immediate ancestors was a balls-out racist.  My father's father was raised with the attitudes common to the descendants of Southern plantation owners of the time, and embraced them without reservation.  For him, the term we dance around as an obscenity far greater than "fuck" was the primary term he had for Americans of African descent, although he condescended to use "colored" as a genteel euphemism for the few he thought were people of quality.  As far as I know, he took those attitudes to his grave.

He was also a cold and distant father, borderline emotionally abusive, to his sons, although I am given to understand that he treated both his wife with tenderness and respect, and his daughters with at least a gentler hand.  He had the usual toxic ideas about masculinity, and despite not being religious in the slightest, he was at least passively homophobic.  His oldest two sons think he was an alcoholic, although one of them is a teetotaler and thinks this about anyone who drinks more than a glass of wine a week.  He was very much a product of his time and culture, and his freethinking was his primary rebellion against it; in fact, his support for his younger daughter entering a profession and postponing marriage is the only one I can think of.  (Edit: he was also not actively anti-Semitic, which was somewhat unusual at that place and time, but not wholly unheard of, especially among WWII veterans.)

And yet, as I mentioned before, this is one of the two ancestors I know the names of for whom I feel comfortable doing any ancestor reverence for (the other is my paternal grandmother, his wife).  On a day when we celebrate civil rights, and do right reverence to a cultural ancestor and martyr to whose name my grandfather would invariably attach an unpleasant epithet, it seems particularly difficult to balance the good a man did - lives saved on the battlefield, vision saved in a doctor's office, being a loving husband - with the evil he did right beside it, and the evil he passively or actively supported.

Still, we do the same, don't we, when we Pagans are called to our various gods?  We are turned back towards cultures that held to values we find repugnant now.  Racism as we know it is a phenomenon of the Age of Empires, but prejudice against one's neighbors comes standard with the empires of old, whether Roman, Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, or elsewhere and elsewhen.  We have no historical cultures free of sexism, and many where women were treated abominably; while there are many whose policies on sexuality are preferable to our culture's, there are none I can point to and call truly sex-positive.  The idea (loosened from the idea of race) that one human being can and even should non-consensually own another is pervasive in the ancient world.  And many of these values were at least ascribed to the gods; Athena, in particular, was the mouthpiece of some terribly misogynist views, but she is far from the only, or even the worst, of these.

I think that I, at least, have hope that people, spirits, and gods alike continue to evolve.  I would like to think that the gods are not ignorant of the flow of human history - that Liberty has become a part of many goddesses, including Athena.  I would like to believe that the dead, when they see each other without the veil of skin between, understand the harm of treating each other as less than human, and of supporting the social structures that do the same even without any individual ill-feeling.  And my experiences, though small and sometimes confusing, tend to point in that direction.

At any rate, there is much work to be done here, whether the ancestors join us gladly in that work or not.  And if not, then there is that much more work to be done, to turn them, too, around.

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