The Poly-Love I Need

My latest effort for our South Bay Poly newsletter.  Perhaps I've got it, more or less, this time.

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I’m trying this again.  For years I’ve tried to put my finger on, and explain, what polyamory means to me; why, for me, it is different from “free love.”  A few days ago I thought I had it; well let’s see.

For me it’s a lot like the “standard paradigm” of finding love—only with more people.  It isn’t “promiscuity” as I understand it; it isn’t “sleeping around.”  It isn’t “love for kicks with strangers.”  But it can happen with more than one person at once.

Maybe that’s it.  It isn’t sex with strangers I’ll never see again.  It’s getting closer to people I’m attracted to and am interested in; people I’d like to be close to for an extended time (possibly forever).

Not to say that “sex can’t be just fun.”  It can be.  But, for me, not with strangers.  I’m not comfortable enough with most people to enjoy physical closeness.  At the very least, if I’m with someone I don’t know very well, I have to feel like I’m becoming close to them.

Inside and Outside

Here’s another interesting fact about military bases, such as the ones I grew up on:  they’re a finite size and enclosed.  That gives them something in common with a ghetto.

I’ve already described how my family could buy most of what they needed “on base.”  We could buy food, other products, and entertainment on base, much of it within walking distance.

From the age of six to the age of fifteen—with a year and a half or so gap—I lived on air force bases, although my father was a civilian.

When I was a teenager living on base—this was in Japan—I would take long walks every day after school.  Some of these walks would take me along the southwest boundaries of the base.  I would look at the fence that ran around the base and think about how I was inside the base and the area on the other side of the fence was outside.  There wasn’t really anything to see; most of that area was dense tree and shrubbery.

It wasn’t that I particularly thought of the “outside” as being somehow threatening compared to the “inside.”  Or that I thought the people “inside” were better than the people “outside.”  I just was aware of the division.  Perhaps if I had been older, and actually a member of the military, I would have thought so.

One gets used to how one is raised.  When I lived with the military (but still a civilian) in Germany, it felt very odd at first.  Although my family lived with the U.S. Army, in our own “American” area, we were not sealed off by a fence.  My mother and I never did learn why that was.  The “campus” where I spent my first two years of college—in Munich, Germany—had once been a German military establishment—a caserne—but had been taken over by the U. S. after World War II.  It could have easily been sealed off (and probably once was).  At home with my parents in Nuremberg, it felt odd to not be “protected” by a fence around our American area.  In Munich it didn’t feel so odd—being a college campus, it seemed set off anyway.

I think I have carried this notion of being “sealed off” with me since my childhood.  One of the results of being separated is that you can easily ignore what is “outside” the base perimeter.  However, if you become aware of this tendency, you can overcome it—although you then become aware of how the people around you limit themselves.  

Perhaps that is what happened to me.

Where Did I Come From?

I’ve often wondered—and more lately—what has made me the person I am.  After all, in some ways I’m pretty conventional, but in others—boy, am I “out on the edge!”

I’m sure that some of it has to do with growing up with the (U.S.) military.  I did go to kindergarten in a civilian setting: in Ferndale, Pennsylvania (a suburb of Johnstown), along with my cousin.  My grandmother and my aunt and uncles lived nearby.  But—I lived with only my mother, not my father.  My father was working in Japan.

This is the earliest time I remember—a time without a father, at least physically.  I knew I had a father; he just wasn’t there.  I knew where he was; it was just “somewhere else.”  I remember his visit one year over Christmas.  He came to be with my mother and my two sisters.

Then my father was back “for good,” and for five years we all lived on an Air Force base in Virginia.  I had been born in Virginia (on an Army base) but remembered nothing about it.  My father had left for Korea, probably when I was two, in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Why the switch from Army to Air Force?  My father was not actually in the military.  He worked for the Red Cross, which has a division that supports the military; that is, it provides humanitarian assistance for military personnel.

Up until the age of eleven, I lived in a rather artificial environment.  I walked down the street a few blocks to the base elementary school.  When I wanted to go to a movie, I walked a little further down the street.  When I wanted to go swimming in the summer, I walked a block to the Officers Club.   We bought some of our food at the base commissary, additional food at a supermarket off base.  We bought other stuff at the Base Exchange (“BX”).  “Off-base” was a bit of a drive; we could walk to everything on-base.

The church we attended offered a generic Protestant service designed not to offend any of the Protestants in the military.  There was also a Catholic service and a Jewish service.  I’m not sure how the Mormons and more “fringe” Protestants felt about the Protestant service.  Eventually, after several years just attending Sunday School, I went with my mother to Sunday services (I don’t think my father ever attended).  I don’t recall the services being at all “evangelical”—although I remember a few hymns such as “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus.”

But how is it that, in time, I became a Unitarian Universalist Pagan; and realized that I was bisexual and polyamorous?

Poison Gas in Syria

Still contemplating the situation in Syria relating to the use of poison gas.  And what do I know about it?  I read reports—are the reports accurate?
 

I know poison gas is a nasty thing.  I know world organizations have outlawed poison gas as a weapon.  But they’ve outlawed a lot of things. How can this ban be enforced?  Maybe it can’t be enforced.

I have written my congress people, opposing direct U.S. military action in Syria “at this time.”  I suppose I should have called....(or should I??).  “Direct.”  “At this time.”  But maybe later (or sooner?), with the proper wisdom.

It's curious. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, I felt like I was one of the few people in the country who was neutral. But I couldn't commit either way. Instead I was, perhaps, simply numb -- stunned?

As a long-time member of Amnesty International, I knew what a heartless dictator Saddam Hussein was. But I also was pretty sure that George "W." was acting from extremely questionable motives.

So I stood and watched as American tanks moved into Iraq, then I sent a card to the Muslim Students Association on my campus.  They in turn invited me to their meetings.  I attended a few and met a few of their members.

Now, years later, I’m left with much to ponder.  Assad is pretty heartless…

It’s easy to condemn and punish someone when you’re enemies anyway.  

And speaking of Syria, poison gas, and the world in general...

I’ve been watching videos of one of the great tangos of all time -- "Cambalache" ("The Junk Shop")—its theme is the insanity of the 20th Century (and it was written in 1934, before the depth of the insanity and inhumanity had even become apparent.  Several videos are compilations of photos chronicling the best and worst (mostly the worst) people and events of the last hundred or so years.  There are different videos, with different compilations.  What would you chose?  We see pictures of starving children and parents, the World Trade Center towers bursting into flame.   Pictures of Hitler and Bin Laden.  George W. Bush.  Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa.  A few pictures from the Vietnam War.

The concept of “The Junk Shop” is that everything is tossed in together, and priced the same:  the “ass” and the “great professor”—they’re all treated as of equal value.

I don’t recall any photographs relating to the Cambodian genocide, the “Dirty War” in Argentina, the Japanese (or Indonesian) tsunamis, the Bhopal disaster, Chernobyl…  I suppose the choices would be personal.  There were photographs or paintings of various leaders (I think one sequence was supposed to show a series of Latin American leaders—with particular “remarks” about Pinochet.  No pictures of Franco, though).

Curiously, the more I read about foreign governments, the more I appreciate the United States form of government.  Nevertheless, I grow more aware of its flaws.  Nothing is perfect.

So the world must say something about Syria.  But what to say?  What can we agree on?  That poison gas is nasty and has been outlawed and shouldn’t be used.  But can we stop it?

U. S. Labor Day

I’ve been a member of a union for the past twelve years, and I like it.  Why?  Because I feel I have some support in counterbalance to the influence my workplace has over my life.

 

Up until 2001, I had never belonged to a union.  My uncle, the mine-worker, had.  And I remember hearing my relatives complain that the union was “always going out on strike.”  Maybe they had reason to.  My uncle worked in a very dangerous profession and he and his colleagues deserved respect and the safest possible working conditions.  There are many dangers in coal mining:  Black lung, mine collapse, etc.

I lead a slacker’s life in comparison.  I work in I.T.—“Information Technology”—in an office, sitting around roughly eight hours a day on a standard daytime shift.  What can I complain about?

Still, anyone who can be “hired and fired” can be treated like dirt.  I remember my earlier job at a large semiconductor company in Silicon Valley.  The company asked for volunteers to get together and discuss ways to improve worker morale.  I made a few suggestions and mentioned the possibility of the group serving as workers’ “advocates.”  I was told that this sounded a little too much like a union.  I’d grown up with a positive opinion of unions, so I asked “what was wrong with that?”  I didn’t get an answer, just polite (or maybe uncomfortable?) smiles.

I don’t remember much happening with our suggestions.  Of course, I had also thrown in a few remarks about how maybe managers shouldn’t behave in quite such a “macho” fashion in their Monday morning discussions of the weekend football games—since some people weren’t interested in football or in encouraging “macho” behavior.  More polite smiles.

Previously, at a large telecommunications company, I had sometimes worked sixty-hour weeks—but gotten paid double-time for it.  But I never got asked my opinion about it.

Now—in the union—we can make our opinions known.  We work according to a contract that has been negotiated and agreed to by both the union and by the administration.  If the administration doesn’t live up to the agreement, we can take it to the Public Employment Relations Board.  Workers are not at the complete mercy of the administration.

And I like that.

Happy Labor Day!