poliphilo

"As you grow older you become an immigrant from a vanished country, a country some of your peers may remember but the young may find unimaginable or incomprehensible."

That's not me, that's Rebecca Solnit in this morning's Guardian. She's talking about the expansion of consciousness that has occurred in her lifetime- especially in the field of women's rights- and how things that couldn't be discussed when she was young- simply because the language didn't exist- have now become sayable. She throws out some new words I didn't know the meanings of- himpathy, intersectionality, misogynoir- so I looked them up. Himpathy is what President Trump felt for poor Justice Kavanagh when the women from his past were nasty to him, intersectionality describes the complexity of social identity- how a person is never just rich or poor but poor and white and female or rich and black and male- and misognynoir is the combination of sexism and racism that consigns black women to the bottom of the social heap. I write these definitions down in the hope that I'll remember them. It behoves us survivors of an older, stupider culture to pay attention to the wisdom of the young- and keep up, keep up, keep up...