Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Bregman My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’m not an economist or politician…
Author
Category: Global Transformation
This is a rant and a personal campaign against the jeans-ing of American women. It’s time for a Jeans Rebellion!
Collectively, we’ve lost our sense of style. Men look good in jeans. Women? Not so much. So why is nearly every woman at the mall and the farmer’s market clad in them? Because they’re easy? Or are we universally depressed and want to make ourselves look bad? Well, we’ve succeeded.
A recent trip to an upscale mall confirmed it: nearly every woman wore jeans. I have it on good authority that only the rare female looks appealing in denim. Old, young, in between, tall, thin, short, plump—doesn’t matter. For most they’re terribly unflattering, says my male resource. Same with that stretchy active wear that might feel comfortable but does nothing for your, um, profile.
So why wear these things?
They crush, they bind, they confine, they pinch, they are stiff and unyielding and hot and constrict your movements. Ah, now maybe we are getting somewhere. Are they a device, a plot to keep women in check?
Last Friday, the day before an event in Charlottesville, Virginia, which may soon bring down a President, a total stranger and I experienced a profound moment that made the next day’s clashes that much more horrifying, and yet, gave us an insight into how the country might heal.
It’s not your usual rhetoric from social scientists, as helpful as that might be. Our solution is what you might consider “out there” in terms of its underlying philosophy. But if this stranger and I could see, feel, and understand it—simultaneously—isn’t there hope for others whose lives seem, on the surface, to come from completely different cultures? A divide we have trouble crossing?
What unites us? We are human. As human beings, we all possess … hair. As women … it matters to us. A lot. We think about it every morning. We fret over it and we style it and we curse it and we admire ourselves in mirrors when it does what we want it to. And yet—we have a natural divide. Your hair and my hair and her hair and his hair—they are all unique, right? What you have to do with yours to get it into shape, well, it’s something I might not know about.
If this stranger and I could see, feel, and understand it …
The philosopher/psychologist William James wrote about this in a famous essay titled On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings and it’s one of my favorites. We will never, ever, ever fully understand the “other”—unless we step outside of our insular worlds and ask. Even so, we only have words to tell us and anything we can find in our own experience that relates, roughly, to that description.
I had a need to know something highly personal about an “other,” so that’s exactly what I did. I stopped a total stranger and asked her about her hair. Not so strange you say? It happens in salons? We were shopping in a Target store, completely minding our own business inside the usual silent divide. Still not unheard of? I am white and the woman is black.
One of my blog readers from India recently asked, “Who is Ernest L. Norman?” I thought I’d share an expanded version of my reply here,…
“What’s not on the menu?” This idea crept into our household, Joseph’s and mine, from an article we stumbled into on Facebook and devoured together.
What is society no longer offering you? How has your life been shrunk down into compartments designed by Others? Are you only choosing what’s on the menu? Or are your mind and spirit looking beyond, drawing from the vast infinite wellspring of options that we used to see more clearly—until Internet design took over and limited our choices to a menu devised by software developers. What’s not on that menu? Do you ever wonder?