Fall Cleaning and Our Family Inventory

Being a reasonably neat person, twice a year, I have what we call agonizing reappraisal. Where everything in the house is cleaned and inventoried and we let go of things we no longer use, need, want or enjoy. I've been doing that this week in the house but I also have to do it in my internal life.

It's a chance for me to really look at what I value and why. Some folks go their whole lives without ever asking themselves why they believe a thing.

An election year has turned out to be a good time for this. I have watched my feelings rise and fall in favor of and against many of our country's most polarizing issues. Marriage equality, personhood, women's rights, taxes, education, the actual role of government, what family means to me, and I found myself delighted and surprised in many ways by what motivates what I hold dear.

I find, that it is often because it is a reaction to being a marginalized person for whatever reason. I feel sometimes injustice has been handed down to me and because of that, wish to stand up for others. Honestly, I believe everyone has a right to their opinions and will take the action they take, based on their beliefs. I see some people though, in the popular status (known as traditionalists), who get all the mainstream goodies and don't want to share them. I think this comes less from the actual rightness but more from fear that there is only so much to go around and that somehow we have to protect elite status to keep what we have. Fear that says I am in no way equal to the human being next to me who lives a different sort of life than I do. Whether that person is unemployed with kids to feed, or LGBT, or non traditional religiously. When people cease to be human you may then justify any behavior that goes against human nobility and decency.

I feel that if we were more ready, in our society, to honestly thaw out our own frozen ideas and really look at them, we would be less inclined to point the finger at our fellow man quite so much. In the family I have chosen this is critical to getting along. The only person I can truly know is myself and the only person I can safely change is myself. The more I accept that the better wife, mother, and citizen I am. What do you think?