My parents had, at times, severe issues… I’d delve into it on this blog but there are so many haters reading this who, ironically, I trust less than anyone in person who’s ever hurt me so I’ll be vague. *smile* If you’re reading this and you’re not a hater great. Maybe you’ll like this post…
Since I was told my birthday is in November (maybe it is??) growing-up I often celebrated with pumpkin pies and other Thanksgiving related items. Sometimes my Thanksgiving was also my birthday.
Anyway, one year I requested the birthday gift from my parents of tickets to The Nutcracker for a friend and myself. We were 13 and 14, if I recall it correctly. Or maybe I was turning 14? At any rate, it was an excellent local performance in a historic theater and aside from one leering 40-something man who was with his family it was an innocent and safe time.
You know it’s funny, when we talk about the Millennial youth experience we don’t talk about how we’d whisper to each other about the “weird guy” staring at us and laugh at him careful not to be noticed. We knew that at 40-something it was odd for him to feel so keen and entitled for no other reason than us standing these. I’d say spotting them in public started at 13 or 14 or so for a lot of us… The people I knew ignored it. And all these years later hearing stories about Jeffrey Epstein didn’t come as a shock so much as a wave of grief. How could he be so lost to his insanity, enabled to lose his mind and damn himself and others? How could those girls not realize that he was only insane? My friends and I knew those men were off…and so we avoided them and weren’t interested. He would have been a pitiable man not in touch with reality to us. A man with both real power and terrifying delusions. Didn’t Millennial kids in general make jokes about people like him when we observed them in schools and elsewhere?
No, I don’t blame victims. I try not to, anyway. However, I don’t like to whitewash or sugarcoat things either. Most of the young women J. Epstein took advantage of were from some socio-economic trouble in their background and I think when I consider Millennials I read too much of my own part of the generation into the word. What I mean is that my friend and I were relatively sheltered in this way. And, being sheltered isn’t the same thing as being spoiled. We knew to avoid men like that. Situations like that. (Thank God.) Are we perfect judges of character? Maybe not? But…I think about how much worse our lives could have been and I feel frighteningly blessed. Maybe some Millennials were never warned about “those people”. …
There are reasons I’ve lost my “idealism” over the years. It happens in every generation. Evil exists and boundaries can manifest in weird ways. But, regardless, I’d like to live in a world where my daughter can also laugh at the “silly man”when she’s safely with her friends instead of being forced to accept his advances in the name of “social progress” to “dismantle” something… There are a great many societal ills in this world but I worry we go much too fast to correct things, missing nuances and our own limitations, corroding remnants of safety to improve reality.
Some changes are overdue. Sometimes a woman in her 20’s could fall genuinely in love with a man in his 40’s, as in they’d actually be in love. But…those men don’t often leer mindlessly for far too long at the 13 and 14 year olds at the Nutcracker. There’s a difference between “Charade” and a Netflix exposé waiting to happen. There’s a difference between dismantling systematic racism in a legal system and “dismantling capitalism” and destroying a community in the process.
…
The ballet was lovely. I’ve not gone enough since. Only twice. Yes, just twice. Oh well… And I’d like to help create a world where more women could say that about their brief encounter with “those guys”. Wouldn’t you? But how? Right…
Happy September.
