Duality

Helen Keller

A professor of mine brought up this topic a few years back, and it has stuck with me. He said to most; George Bush was either JC's BFF, (not his exact words) or he was an evil moron. Bill Clinton was either an amazing leader, or he was degenerate pond slime. There was no grey area. It was black or white. But wasn't it quite possible that George Bush was neither of those two things and instead he was a good manager of people who didn't have the greatest knowledge of foreign affairs? And Bill Clinton was not Mahatma Ghandi, (another complex figure), or Larry Flint but rather a charming man who had some marital issues? This would be Duality. But how could that be? In my world I felt safe if I could stick people in to categories. Hitler: Evil with a capital E. Mother Theresa: Good with a capital G. And so on... There were good people and bad people...right? But was Hitler evil or was he a man who was very persuasive, and very mentally ill? Was Mother Theresa a saint, or was she a woman who had her faults, but also liked to serve others? I am reading an interesting book right now, entitled Lies My Teachers Told Me. http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/liesmyteachertoldme.php It deals with this exact idea; that it is human nature to want to demonize and canonize individuals, events, etc.. We want to paint the world as black and white. We want there to be a "bad guy" and a "hero". We want the hero to win. We don't want to know if the hero has flaws, or if the bad guy has another side to him. We feel safe when people and events fall in to these categories. For instance, when we think of Helen Keller, we often think of the movie with Patty Duke, and the story we learned in school, about the blind, deaf, and dumb girl overcoming it all with hard work. But what we don't know is what happened to Helen Keller AFTER that. Who was she when she grew up? What did she do?...The answer: "she was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909. Keller's commitment to socialism came from her experience as a disabled person. She worked to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon realized that dealing solely with blindness was treating the symptom, not the cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population, but was concentrated in the lower classes; because of accidents in poor working environments, poor medical care, or women who were prostitutes who contracted syphilitic blindness. In effect, Keller learned that a person's social class controlled their opportunities in life, as well as their health. So here was one of the most famous women on the planet, coming out as a full-fledged supporter of socialism. She helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union, she supported the Socialist candidates for President, she composed essays on the subject, and worked tirelessly for this cause for the remainder of her life. But what do we know of this side of our Helen Keller?? Nothing. As soon as she came out in favor of these positions, institutions like the Brooklyn Eagle wrote columns that she was mentally inferior, where three years previously they had sung her praises for being gifted beyond belief, despite her physical limitations." And so the watered down "canonized" version of Helen Keller was created, and passed down, and taught to us and we bought it...because it felt good. But the unfortunate thing about black and white, is that it leaves out all the interesting, colorful, parts of life. I am not a good or bad person, I am not a "good mother" or a "bad mother"-I have up moments, and down. I do not have a "good" marriage or a "bad" marriage- I have a marriage that fluctuates perpetually between God-Awful and Sheer-Bliss, with everything in between, and that's life! So, as uncomfortable as it may be at times, I need to remember to adjust my TV screens from black-and-white to full-color. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller