Wheelchair dream
I had a dream the other night that I got hurt as a child and was paralyzed. They told me I had to be in a wheelchair. After a long time in the wheelchair, so long that I was an adult now, I got frustrated and finally tried to stand up on my own two legs, and I could. I walked with a little limp but I could walk and it got better the more I focused and practiced. Then I realized I could have walked the whole time and I didn’t need to be in a wheelchair. I was furious with everyone for putting me in the wheelchair and telling me I couldn’t walk.
When I woke up I remembered the dream and it seamed like a pretty obvious metaphor for a lot of stuff I have been through and continue to go through. Our whole lives society tells us we are not good enough and makes us feel bad about ourselves. If we are lucky someday we finally decide to try out feeling good about ourselves and believing that we are good. And my god it works! We can’t stand tall all the time, but with practice we get better our legs become stronger and our footing more steady.
And of course we are furious with everyone for telling us we had to feel bad about ourselves, especially with those who raised us and taught us the most. What we fail to see is that those who raised us are in wheelchairs also. In fact the whole world are in wheelchairs and they don’t know any other way.
With time our rage calms and our vision clears and we see the true state of the world. So we start to pull people out of their wheelchairs, but they are afraid so they fall back into the comfort of their wheelchairs. After a while we get frustrated, “why don’t people want to stand up with me! Can’t they see it is better to stand?” It is exhausting and maybe we get tired and fall back into our own wheelchair, which of course everyone else has been pushing around behind us the whole time anyway.
But a few of us find another way. Some of us realize forcing people to stand up is not at all effective. So we adopt a different approach. We hold someone’s hand, we are patient as they try to follow our example and stand up on their own. Or we stretch out our arms to hug someone, over and over again, each time moving a little further away so the person has to lean a little further forward each time to hug us. And eventually, like a child learning to walk, who is only focusing on their mothers loving face, they don’t even notice that they are standing up and walking to give us a hug.
This is just one way that we can tell the story and there are countless other metaphors in every culture around the world.
One of the reasons culture is a powerful and important force is that culture shows us who we really are. It shows us our shared humanity, and in doing so it shows us that we are all connected and we are all good. But what we think of as culture today is a mixture of culture and society, the same society that tells us we are not good enough. In that way the power of culture is controlled and subdued.
Can we generalize and say that society is generally a destructive force and culture is a creative force? Probably not, but they are probably in a yin yang relationship. Religion for example could be seen as societal, spirituality as cultural. The art market is societal, artistic expression is cultural. Like the familiar symbol for yin and yang, the seed of the other can be found in each.
-Jesse Hemminger (2009)
