Ann Coulter makes me wonder about New Canaan, the pleasant white upper middle class town we grew up in.
Ours was the class of 1980, New Canaan High School; we didn't share the same circles of friends: just faces amongst the swirl that recognized each other as Rams, sharing benignly the hallways, classrooms, gyms and fields of that liberal, intense, well-funded institution. I knew her friends, but not her. She was shy and self-possessed, at least around me. I wasn't interested in rules and grades; she must have been, obviously was. Of the same ilk we are—ilk a mossy word expressing the kinship of people who grow up in the same place. If I meet Ann, or any old New Canaanite, we can share warm stories of carol singing on God's Acre on Christmas Eve or watching fireworks at Waveny Castle. Perhaps also of Fats Tuesday and Hidden Lake.
From 7th to 12th grade we never shared the same classroom—and were constructed by something larger than just school or sports fields; it was our biocultural totality, local, all pervasive, that enclosed and generated us. We hatched from the same egg. So, how did we became who we are? I'm a professional environmental educator and, being the treehugging egalitarian multiculturalist, my politics are decidedly to the left. With 12 best-selling books and 2.2 twitter followers, Ann is an educator of political philosophy that is decidedly not to the left:
New Canaan contained the fundaments of our characters. We used them to construct ourselves. I wonder about them when I wonder about us and what we've become. What was "New Canaan"?
Comments