Cancer/writing Journal #94

 I had intended this as a comment to the prior blog entry.  I started it, got called away and when I came back, it had disappeared.  If it could have been recovered, it was beyond my computer skills to do so.  So, here goes--again.

The list of what has been banned in Boston, noted in the comments to blog # 93, makes for interesting reading.  The tendency is to read the list and respond with scorn and derision.  There's some pretty tame stuff on there, not that much of a whiff of the sexual.  Those banners really took protective care of the impressionable Bostonians!  Let me ask you to look at the list a little differently though.  Not through the eyes of those with current standards and priorities but through the eyes of the times.  That's hard.  We have placed such a premium on unrestrained free expression, especially concerning sexual subjects that it is about impossible to enter our imagination into a place where any whisper of anything regarding sex was simply not a subject for discussion--or any other public anything.

But the past is another country as they say.  Imagine if you were going to an Islamic country and expressing scorn at their practice of stopping everything five times a day and praying.  Or going to India and and announcing that things would be much better without all the cows wandering around.  If we were to do that, we would be displaying hopeless xenophobia.  Much better to treat those differences with open-minded, non-judgmental interest.  Let me invite you to treat the other country of 100 years ago, plus or minus, with the same open-minded, non-judgmental interest.  

And those folks had a case.  Let me do an improbable fusion of Sarah Palin and the Boston banners considering the sexual impulse let out of the corral and free to roam the range and asking, "And how's that been working out for ya?"  And the answer in many ways has been, "Not real well."  Easy online availability of pornography has in many instances adversely affected the enjoyment of robust and enthusiastic marital sex.  I could go on.  The Boston banners would have said, "You really should have kept that private thing in the corral where it belonged."

Now, of course, that ship has sailed.  No way are we reconstructing the corral and herding sexual impulses back in there.  And very probably it's best that we don't.  There were a lot of casualties in the regime of tightly laced sexuality.  Not that we are free of casualties of a different sort now but still, while we won't and shouldn't go back, the question is not so absolutely black and white as to warrant our scorn and derision for the inhabitants from the other country of a different time. 

 There.  Said my peace.