Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is not telling you to STAY IN YOUR LANE! She writes:

Of all the stupid made-up expressions that are meant to shut discussion down and shut people up, “Stay in your lane!” has to be among the most offensive. “Excuse me, Mr. Colbert, or any other robotic loser who says that, but who died and made YOU The Lane Czar?”

How ironic that most of the jerks saying “Stay in your lane!” don’t even believe you have to stay in your biological sex lane. The notion that human beings must plod along on one beaten path without veering to the right or left, without changing professions or interests or opinions in a lifetime, is nonsense on stilts. Whether on the freeway behind a motor home, or whether on a life-pathway strewn with obstacles and toxic people, sometimes it is absolutely necessary to leave the Slow Lane via the Passing Lane to get past the blockage.

The free speech-suppressing idea that we don’t have the right to weigh in on an issue that is outside our immediate experiential purview, i.e., our “assigned” lane, is also obnoxious. As is the wretched notion that only “experts” get to weigh in on anything. Especially when the same biased, politically motivated scumbuckets who decide what lane you’re supposed to be in also decide who the “experts” are.

I do not need to have lived in Elizabethan times to appreciate or discuss Shakespeare. Trying to raise a black foster child, I did not need to be “of color” myself to see the effects the worst aspects of current black culture had on my son, the devastating notion that excelling in school is “acting white,” being only one of the most destructive.

I don’t need to be black in order to know that dropping out of school, committing crimes, selling or doing drugs, fathering children out of wedlock with multiple women, and not working are much more significant than skin color in predicting how your life is going to turn out.

In just MY ONE LITTLE LIFE, I have been in enough lanes to constitute a major Los Angeles freeway. I have been a Psychology major who volunteered in Chicago State Mental Hospital. A Sociology major who tutored black children in the Lawndale section of Chicago. An Accounting Major who never took a single course — I changed at the last minute to a Speech/Communications Major — in my third and final college. Praise God!

I have lived in rural small town Minnesota twice, on an Indian reservation in Sisseton, SD, in an “efficiency” apartment in Evanston, Illinois, in a “railroad” flat in the Mission District of San Francisco. I lived in a quasi-commune in South Minneapolis and a basement apartment our pre-school son called The Monkey Cave on the East Side of St. Paul. Our first actual house was in suburban Maplewood, MN. And now, of course, I live in Arizona.

I have worked in a drugstore, in a bookstore, had my own nursery school business, was a night-shift typesetter while attending that third college, and then my favorite Speech teacher convinced me to try standup. The rest…as they say…is history.

Had I stayed a typesetter, I would have almost been on Days by now. Had I stayed in the Accounting Lane, I’m pretty sure that my checkbook would look neater, but perhaps it would not have the same amount of money in it. Nothing was guaranteed when I veered out of the Night Shift Typesetting Lane, which was a good union job. But “fortune favored the brave.” Comedy was “berry berry” good to me. Plus I got applause both before and after coming to work, which is nice! And I would have missed the whole wild ride that has been 30 years in standup and 10 years as a columnist.

Only in a rigid class system (like England) or caste system (like India), is your lane neither optional nor easy to leave. A dear British friend of ours said one’s very speech pattern and accent pretty much determined where he would end up in life. Rare exceptions existed. The Beatles come to mind. But our friend was a bright boy from the working class, so he was “allowed” to be an Industrial Engineer. Many of his mates were not that lucky.

Our Chabad friends went to India to work with the Indian Jews there. They were shocked to learn that all apartments had two entrances that led directly into the apartment from the hall. One went into a vestibule and then the apartment’s living room and one went only into the BATHROOM. Because the Untouchables who were the bathroom cleaners could only enter and leave by that door. When our friends tried to convince the poor people that they could use the main door, they refused to “step out of their lane.” They knew where they “belonged” and they ignored that at their peril.

Politically, I have been a teenage Goldwater Girl; a leftie cultist for about a decade, a young wife, a mother, a foster mother, a Jewish convert, a transitional Democrat voter on my way back “home” to conservatism, a parental caregiver, a target shooting enthusiast, a senior citizen! How many lanes is that? Oh, gosh, Mr. Lane Monitor, please tell me what lane I belong in and which one I dasn’t enter! (How awesome is “dasn’t” as a contraction for “dare not”?)

I personally consider all this lane-changing to be the result of decades of experience in which I had learned many lessons and made necessary course corrections instead of just blindly continuing in lanes which were too crowded with idiots or had abruptly dead-ended. If we don’t LEARN from experiences, what is the point in having them?

Speaking of experiences, on our first trip to Israel with our son, 21 at the time, we experienced the heart-stopping driving habits of Israelis. Specifically, the driving of Joe’s first cousin, Avi, who picked us up at the airport. Our son has always been a good driver, and also quite a speedy driver, a fact I mention because it takes a fair amount to scare him. He and I were sitting in the back seat and Joe and Avi were in the front. At some point, I looked over at my pale, wide-eyed son who said sotto voce through clenched teeth: “Mo-o-o-o-m, he’s making his own LANE!!” And so he was. It’s pretty much the whole miraculous story of the State of Israel.

I reminded Jacob that Avi was the only child of two Holocaust survivors. His family had also escaped communism in Hungary and he had survived combat in three wars against Israel. He had been driving in Israel for 40 years and was still among the living. Sometimes it takes a fearless semi-lunatic to create his own lane in life, despite all the critics, naysayers, and jealous cowards who are trying to hold him back. I advised our boy to look out the window and practice deep-breathing. Here we all are, 28 years older and only slightly the worse for wear. Baruch Hashem. (Praise God).

Remember always, you belong in whatever lane you can reach! Tell the people who screech at you to “Stay!” that you’re not a dog.