Topic 190: The Responsibility of Being Sane

Carol:

“If You Can Keep Your Head”

Rudyard Kipling was popular when the young men of the Ivy League were writing their daily themes in 1915 and assigned the topic “the responsibility of being sane.” They were probably more likely to think about Kipling’s 1895 poem “If” than to worry about driving themselves insane from the responsibility to attain academic accolades and become renowned doctors, lawyers or military officers.  As young men well-schooled in the classics, they would have known the latin derivation of “sane” as meaning simply healthy, of being well in both body and mind.

Kipling’s poem is an inspirational primer for “sane” behavior in the tradition of gentlemanly stoicism. Living in Canada for seven years, I read a lot of Kipling and In high school memorized “If” even though the ending left me out: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!” I love the poem anyway for its emphasis on resilience, forgiveness of the failures of others and acceptance of fate. Two of its lines are written on the wall of the players’ entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
 

Kipling’s own life was met with “Triumph and Disaster.”  Born in Bombay, Kipling was sent to England at the age of 7 to board with a family for six years. These were such unhappy years that he later would describe the holidays he sometimes spent with his aunt in London as “a Paradise that I verily believe saved me” (source “Kipling Society”).
 

Kipling began writing as a student, his first verses published in the early 1880’s. His most familiar works were written between 1894-1906, and in 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The Swedish Academy acknowledged some controversy in its choice of Rudyard Kipling, for his use of “coarse language” and slang. However, the presentation speech ended with the following:
 

Kipling has given us descriptions in vivid colours of many different countries. But the picturesque surface of things has not been the principal matter with him; he has always, in all places, had a manly ideal before him: ever to be ‘ready, ay ready at the call of duty’ and then, when the appointed time comes, to ‘go to God like a soldier’ “ (source: Nobel Prize Speech)

Perhaps that notion of duty helped Kipling cope with the  loss of his son John during World War I, reported missing on the Western Front in 1916.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
    “None this tide,
    Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
    Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.” (from “My Boy Jack”)

Whether or not “My Boy Jack” (1919) referred specifically to Kipling’s son or to any son lost in war, it epitomizes the same ideals from “If” of resoluteness and pride.
 

The same year John Kipling died in an unknown place, those Ivy League students were scribbling their compositions. How many of them would soon march off to War steeped in the stiff-upper lip tradition of Kipling’s generation, called by a responsibility to maintain their sanity, to protect the well-being of family and country through self-sacrifice? How many of their parents also took comfort in Kipling?

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide.

Sources:
All information on Rudyard Kipling and full copies of “If” and “My Boy Jack” are found at the Kipling Society website
1907 Nobel Prize Presentation Speech
        

Megan:

The Irresponsibility of Being Insane

The worst thing to call someone is crazy. It’s dismissive. –Dave Chappelle, 2006.

This is one of the topics we pulled earlier in the year and then threw back into the basket. I can’t speak for my mother’s reasons, but I found fault with the premise of the topic. However, we’re winding down now… only 60 topics left, and there’s no point in throwing it back again. We rarely have topics that require us to tread lightly in order to avoid offending people, I don’t want to brush this off with humorous anecdotes and cartoons.

In this case, I must consider my friends and family members who suffer from mental illness. Trivializing their difficulties is out of the question. And it’s out of consideration for them that I am so offended by the implication that being “insane” is an act of immaturity or irresponsibility. I briefly mentioned this to my mother and she suggested that perhaps we could take a more carefree approach to the ideas of sanity and insanity. So, think of chaos, of children screaming, running around and acting crazy.

Acting crazy.

Our vocabularies are infused with out-dated and offensive terms for mental illness. In England, if someone is acting silly, they are called mental or a head case. Over here, you still hear terms like demented, nutty, psycho, and schizo. I used a thesaurus to come up with that list, which is only a partial selection of the terms we once used for the mentally ill that now describe socially unacceptable behavior. And one of the synonyms listed for Crazy is irresponsible.

On the other hand, it’s pretty much common knowledge that it is not okay to use these terms for someone who actually is mentally ill. Political correctness is often bemoaned as having been taken too far, but as with racist and homophobic language, referring to a person who is mentally ill with the same language that describes unacceptable behavior is the same as saying that person is unacceptable.
 

Obviously, there are arguments to be made about context, and about the constant evolution of the English language. Words that once meant one thing now mean another. Take the word “Gay” for example. It used to mean happy, now it means homosexual, but in other contexts it is offensive. I once challenged a housemate when he used the word derisively. He said, “I didn’t mean gay like Gay. I meant gay like rubbish.” I told him that, while I understood that he didn’t actually believe that the board game he’d just lost was homosexual, using the word in that negative context implied a correlation between homosexuality and garbage.
 

 Setting aside arguments about context and linguistic evolution, I still have a problem with equating Responsibility with Sanity. Linking those words, and by implication, their opposites –suggests that sanity is achievable simply by exerting some self-control. And that is crazy. 

Source:
Look up "Crazy" in Thesaurus.com

Topic 154: Personality in Apparel

Carol:

 Hats Off to the Ladies

Darn it if I didn’t miss another big event. April 25 was the official Red Hat Society day. In case you haven’t seen or read about the Red Hat ladies, they are a social organization for women over 50. The first lines of Jenny Joseph’s 1961 poem “Warning” was the inspiration for the Red Hat Society

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.”

The RHS official website makes it clear right at the beginning; these ladies all about fun, frivolity and friendship
 
The word that comes to mind when I see the Red Hat ladies is “crone.” No, not the hunched over, wart-faced witchy types depicted in films, but the archetype of the wise old woman who gathers the young children around her knee for winter stories and passes on life knowledge to her daughters.  The modern crone is a woman who wears her aging as a badge of survival and celebration, comfortable with a new phase of life that is more about gain than loss.
 
I only know one “Red Hatter,” for sure. She has always been fun and frivolous, and she always wears purple to offset her bright red hair. Maybe she read Jenny Joseph’s poem a long time ago and turned to purple when she was young. The poem is not about being old really; it is about being young. Its title is “Warning,” and only the first half of the poem describes the freedom of old age when women can not only wear what they want but act how they want, “and make up for the sobriety of [their] youth.”  The rest of the poem is about the responsibilities young people have, the social and parental duties, the pressure to conform . Joseph throws in a little teaser in the last stanza, a thought that maybe, just maybe, there is room to “practice” the audacity of personal freedom right now, before women get old.  Like I say, my Red Hatter friend doesn’t need the empowerment of a Red Hat Society to make her feel comfortable in her red and purple-ness. She already had it.
 
I have another crone friend who makes me laugh whenever I think about her. She is more of a “Mad Hatter” than a “Red Hatter,” and she has a an outrageous costume for every occasion. Go to her house for the Academy Awards, and she will be dressed in a tiara and long white gloves. She has a hat with sparklers that light up for 4th of July, and rabbit ears for Easter. She honed her talent for frivolity from 20-something years of teaching first and second graders. Her frivolity and lightheaded joy for life is not shallow; it was hard won from a tough childhood.  Her hugs and hats are celebrations of survival.
 
I have another crone friend who makes me applaud whenever I think about her. She was all about hats for a while, for a year that was the antithesis of frivolity and fun. It was the year of wearing hats to cover the bald head from chemo and radiation. It was about a Knit Hat Society of friends who banded together to help her fight the cancer, shopped and cooked and called and cried…and laughed.. ,with her.  I know that behind the “in your face” bravado and the hats there had to have been times of emotional meltdown, but boy did she show me what strength and friendship are all about.
 
I love seeing the Red Hat ladies congregating at the Courthouse Square or meeting for tea in the Wild Iris. But, I already belong to a Society of Fearless and Frivolous Friends, and I take off my hat to them all. 

Sources:

Joseph, Jenny. "Warning." poemhunter,cm. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/warning/

Red Hat Society Official homepage. http://www.redhatsociety.com/index.aspx



  

Megan:

Impersonality in Apparel

Didn’t we already have this topic? For someone who cares as little about clothing as I do, it’s hard to come up new material for another essay.

Instead, I’m going to rant a little bit about what I think is a size-ist policy in mainstream department stores (Size-ist, by the way, is discrimination against people of size.)

Before

After

A few weeks ago, I was watching an episode of What Not to Wear, and Mindy Cohn (Natalie from The Facts of Life) was their victim guest. I really liked her original style, which featured tunic shirts and leggings and comfortable shoes. She looked like she was always on the way to a yoga class, but the woman mostly does voice work now, and it’s nice to be comfortable. After the makeover, she looked pretty nice too – but anyway, she made a point during the episode that resonated with me: Most stores do not stock cute clothes for bigger women.

I shop at Kohls a lot. I’m aware that their clothing is not quality, but they fit my other requirement – cheap and comfortable. What annoys me about that place, is that the first thing you see when you walk in are all the super cute summer dresses on display. I love dresses. One of my favorite things about being back in a consistently warm climate is that I can wear sundresses every day if I want for about 6 months of the year. So, I see the dresses and get excited and then head over to the area with clothes in my size, and there’s nothing. Lots of pants, lots of big shirts, and maybe only two styles of upper-arm-concealing, hide-your-problem-areas-with-excess-fabric dresses. It is extremely frustrating.

This is an old argument. I know that the excuses. It is easier to design a dress in a smaller size because the measurements tend to be more consistent. When you get to the bigger sizes you get people with small hips and a giant bust (or the reverse),  all sorts of fruit shapes (apples and pears and bananas, oh my) and maybe it’s not economically viable to design affordable clothes which account for those variables.
 
Except that I know it is done. We have Maurices, a mid-priced store, in our mall that stocks sizes 0 - 24 – cute and casual as well as professional clothes for plus sized women – and nearly the same dresses for the entire range of sizes. Lane Bryant and Torrid also cater to the bigger sizes, but I would have to drive to Phoenix to shop at those stores, and also they are not very affordable if you are unemployed.

I’ve read that it is harder for overweight people to achieve promotion to higher paying jobs because they are often perceived to be lazy. This perception can only be reinforced by the ill-fitting and unattractive clothing lines available to the lower incomes. I’m not saying the general lack of fitted, cute and sexy options is part of a conspiracy to make plus-sized women feel bad about themselves – there are plenty of other outlets to feed our insecurity. I’m saying there is a market. No matter what their size, most people feel more confident when they look good. Increase our options and maybe we’ll shop more.  And that’s good for the economy, right?

/rant