Today I woke up feeling snarky, bitchy, apt to find fault with anyone I set eyes on. In a word, full of hostility. (I know, I know ... that's three words.)
I drove out to Lake Elkhorn for a morning constitutional — twice around, 50 paces running, 50 walking. The two laps took an hour. By the time I was done at a little before 10 A.M., the temperature was already approaching 95°. But I felt better.
On the way home, I wondered what makes me feel so hostile sometimes.
The first thing I came up with was that the stuff other people do that I don't like — even if they "do" these things only in my imagination — is stuff that I try not to admit I'd be doing if I wasn't such a "good person." Did that so-and-so cut me off in traffic out of his own general antisocial nature, or just out of not giving a damn? Either way, it's something I don't have to visualize myself doing ... as long as I can project all the fault on him.
Then, just as I was congratulating myself for being so insightful, another, deeper insight came along. The insight was this: it all has to do with identity.
That guy who cut me off ... he's a total stranger. He's not someone around whom I build any part of my personal identity. I'm equally alien to his identity structure, and my knowing this is why it's so easy for me to imagine him blowing me off on purpose as he lane jockeys to his heart's content down Route 29.
We all have identities, a fact which comes as no surprise. What does come as a bit of a surprise, at least to someone as slow on the uptake as I classically am, is realizing how crucial other people are to our individual identities.
That's why I call each person's identity a "structure." We construct our identity — each one of us, starting from day one of our lives — through our relationships.
At first, it's relationships with family members — mother, primarily, at the outset; then father, brothers and sisters, members of the extended family, and so on — that help us define in our own minds who we are. Then come people from the neighborhood and wider community outside the home. Then come our age peers in school. By the time we are adults, we ideally have constructed a well-formed, well-rounded identity structure which will serve us well as we branch out into the world.
Family ties are so crucial. That's a (to me) subtle lesson I've learned from one of my favorite series of novels, the Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mystery stories by Tony Hillerman. Leaphorn and Chee, Hillerman's protagonists, are Native American detectives serving on the Navajo Tribal Police in New Mexico.
Leaphorn is impatient with the old tribal ways, but they still exert a pull on Chee. Often, in the course of his investigations, he visits a traditional Navajo family at home. The etiquette requires that both parties spend the first several minutes, if they are strangers, laying out their respective family trees. This is not just to determine if they have relatives in common, though it is that, too. It is also a recognition of the fact that one person cannot convey his or her identity to another without giving the basic template of that identity's structure: the person's nuclear and extended family.
When I taught freshman English and the University of Maryland, I assigned a you-pick-the-topic essay. I asked the students one by one to announce in class what they'd be writing about, and why. One young woman, mentioning that she was an adoptee, said she would discuss the importance to her of locating her birth mother. I was caught by surprise, since I hadn't really expected students to pick topics of personal emotional importance. When I questioned her about that, she was adamant; this was the topic she wanted to address.
Looking back, I now realize that to her, her very identity was at stake at a vital point in her life. One obviously draws part of one's sense of identity from one's birth mother, even if one has yet to meet her.
I'd say the father is equally important as the mother, if not right away. At some point in a child's development, he or she will wind up with a stunted or lopsided identity structure if "Dad" isn't there and doing his job.
The late guru of myth Joseph Campbell always made a big deal about sons' initiations into male society via the father and his male associates, a rite of passage which involves radically severing the apron strings tying the boy to his mother. (I'm not quite sure how applicable this process is to daughters, I admit.) I'm also aware that, according to psychiatrists, men with ingrained criminal tendencies, when interviewed in prison, typically are found to pretty much worship the ground their mothers walk on. Mom is usually the only person the male criminal would not cheat or rob.
Putting both of these observations together, I surmise that (at least for boys) it is absolutely crucial, at a certain age, that "Dad" get built into a child's developing identity structure.
How surprising is it, then, that fatherless, broken homes in the inner city so often produce boys that join gangs as soon as they can and get into trouble? The gangs become prostheses, as it were: fake identity structures that will have to do since "Dad" is long gone.
Identity structures are yet more complex, though. At some point, each young person will need to fit into a community. Translation: the community will become part of his/her identity structure. This is what it means to "have a good name": to be able to fit into the community and be accepted by it.
If someone is not deemed acceptable to the community at large, he/she may (again) develop a stunted or lopsided identity structure.
The perpetrators of the recent "transit bombings" in London were apparently Muslims from "South Asia," which I assume means Pakistan. According to news coverage, second-generation Pakistani men in Britain feel alienated, unaccepted by the white Britons. Out of this alienation seemingly came the willingness to kill total strangers and sacrifice one's own life in doing it.
In the terms of this discussion, these suicide bombers seem to have had a stunted, lopsided identity structure because they weren't able to patch their individual identities into that of the broader community, at the point when that process was supposed to occur in their young lives.
We are who we build into our identity structures in our youth, and if the construction process doesn't go right, there'll be hell to pay.
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