You’ll notice the name at the top of this page is now “Earthman’s Notebook,” instead of www.patheos.com/blogs/acitizenofearth. (I know it’s a bit hard to read. I’m trying to figure out how to add a drop shadow or something, to make it more readable.)
I’ve been thinking about the name for a while now, first in relation to a book I’m writing (at the pace of a handicapped snail), and second in relation to the blog. I put it here to establish whatever copyright it gives.
Growing up, I passed through a number of tribal identifications: member of my specific family, Baptist, Texan, Houstonian, Astros fan, male, bookish nerd, cowboy, Deep Souther, American — all of which I held to with one measure of pride or another.
But … you grow beyond things. There came a point where I didn’t really even think of myself specifically as human. I mean, I’m undeniably Homo sapiens, but I felt more like a … dang, I’m not even sure there’s a good word for it.
Years back, I wrote a piece about kinship, the shared heritage we humans have with animals, and the writing of it changed me.
First, the piece forced me to recognize the brother-close kinship we have with chimps, but also with dogs, bears and just about everything else alive. Second, it killed the last of the racism fed into me in Texas like mother’s milk. If you really and truly believe, as I do, that dogs and bears, etc., are family, it compresses the distance between “white” people and “black” people to zero. In the human race, there is no “us” and “them.” Humans are all “us.”
I’ve come to think of myself as a beast, but I mean the word in a good, warm, loving, uplifting way. A Brother Beast. It’s a description not meant to denigrate myself or other humans, and not really even to raise the non-human critters to some humanistic “equal to” status, but to level the regard for all of us, to see us all as family, without any superior and inferior.
I’m an American, and a citizen of the United States, and I feel a definite pride at that …
In my book, it’s George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Co. – plus the entire Democratic wing of congress – who are perhaps the greatest traitors to American ideals to come along in my lifetime. The ideals, and some damned good ones, are intact; they’ve just been cheated and trampled on by some very stupid, very selfish, very cowardly people.
Reason is the defense for the mind against the lies of people like Bush and Rove.
For the heart, the defense against the hate and death of BushCo. is love. Compassion. The broadminded recognition of a kinship that extends well beyond the cramped, hateful little nazitude that they and other religious conservatives have stabbed into the heart of the world.
… but I also begin to feel myself to be a member of something larger. Brother Beast is a citizen not just of a nation, or a people, but of a planet. A Citizen of Earth.
So: I write here as an Earthman, and this is my notebook.