[MD] Platt's Pure Critique of Pantheism

[Mary]

In response to Ed Abbey--Desert Solitaire, The First Morning.

 

A parable.

 

Hello John and Lu,

 

I smoke.  I always have.  At least, I can't remember the time when I didn't.
It is a part of me, like breathing (just like it in fact), and a big part of
my "cultural heritage" if you could use such a fancy term for my
depression-era share-cropper, southern red-neck combined with Choctaw,
Cherokee, and Comanche, Southern Baptist, bible-thumping, black Irish
ancestry.  I am descended, in other words, from a line of Okies, or
poor-white trash, or reservation Indians, or whatever other term you'd like
to use, all of which are derogatory, but that's ok with me.  I have an 81
year old aunt, Daddy's little sister, who can still smoke me under the
table, and that takes some doing because I smoke a lot.  It is no longer, of
course, socially acceptable.  

 

The social unacceptability of smoking started in California some years ago
and has spread all the way to Texas.  I think sometime around 1986 was the
last time I was able to smoke in peace at my desk.  I've had lots of jobs
since then, and even put myself through college, but all this occurred while
huddling with a few other hardy smokers in the rain, or under an awning if
we were lucky, in freezing cold and suffocating heat year end and year out.
The weather is not so nice as California's anywhere else.

 

When you do this you meet lots of people you probably wouldn't even talk to
otherwise.  They're not your type, you know.  You hear about people's
political beliefs, their religion, their job certainly since that's why
we're all out there in the freezing wind, their kids, their ex-husbands and
wives, and their personal tragedies.  It's a real education.  Smoking
outside with people that would otherwise be total strangers day after day,
at 10, noon, and 2, for as many years as you end up working at a place is a
real education as opposed to the kind you're supposed to get.

 

What  I've learned from about 30 years of doing this is that everybody has
personal pain.  It doesn't matter if you are the CIO or the payroll clerk.
Smoking is a great leveler.  You meet them all, every day, three times a
day.  Over the years I've developed some listening skills.  I can hear the
pain in somebody's voice or see it in their posture.  They may be talking
about who won the Cowboy's game last night, but I hear something else.
There are a lot of different types of people, and of course, everybody's
unique, but in a lot of ways the same.  They fall into categories.  There
are a finite number of ways people can choose from for dealing with their
pain.   Down here in the south, the safest choice is to join a church.
People who do this tend to be bright and a little overly cheerful but don't
cross them.  Everybody with any sense knows that the fastest way to make an
enemy out of a church-goer is to admit that you are not.  

 

One of the guys I smoke with regularly is an Indian, from India, that is.  I
work with a lot of them along with people from various places in Europe, the
Far East and everywhere else where you can get a 401b visa.  They're nice
people for the most part.  Nicer than us.  There's a fundamental difference
between Americans and everybody else.  I confided in my Indian friend one
time that I was an atheist.  What a mistake!  A few days later several of us
were smoking and he brought it up.  He said it out loud!  For him, it was a
natural, casual remark.  He was totally oblivious to the damage this kind of
information in the wrong hands could do.  Down here, people have lost their
jobs for less.  The alarm bells started going off in my head and I was
actually scared.   I wanted so much to tell him to just shut up!
Fortunately, there weren't any southern religious types in the group that
day, but it could have been worse, and I could see the warning glances in
the eyes of all the other Southerners.  This is dangerous territory.  Down
here you never say something like that.  Them are fightin' words.  It was
all my fault, of course.  I should never have told him that, but he seemed
very open and accepting of such things.  Problem is, it never occurred to me
that he was clueless about just how dangerous this could be as a public
statement in Texas, or Arkansas (where I grew up) or anywhere else south of
the Mason-Dixon Line - and probably a good number of places north of it too.

 

When you live down here you quickly learn to cater to religious people.  You
sort of pander like a sycophant.  It's the safest way.  I've been prayed
over, invited to "pack the pew" night, looked at askance, and maligned at
various times over the years enough to know it's best just to not bring it
up at all, and if you get backed into a corner, just smile sweetly and lie,
lie, lie your way out of it.  Why is this so?

 

Mary

 

- The most important thing you will ever make is a realization.