Along with highly sensitive skin, an analytically-wired brain and a penchant for waking up at obscene hours of the morning to "get a start on the work day", I've inherited my father's impulsive, sharp and white-hot temper. Like a water-skimming beetle or a black hawk helicopter, our moods can change directions in an instant, from amused to outraged and back again before anyone else has so much as uttered a word.
When we argue, my father and I clear the dinner table, the living room, or the front porch of witnesses, our volume level increasing as we volley absolutes back and forth - mine, liberal postmodernism and cultural relativity; his, the moral majority and will of a cornered Christian who feels that his worldview is threatened in my postmodern world. Nobody else in the family shares this temper, and I know that it's warily assumed that we enjoy such inevitable battles with each other, that we tempt fate each time we discuss the environment or politics or world affairs, and that we revel in the cacophony of a father and daughter desperately trying to make the other one see reason.
But what I know all too well and what the rest of our family cannot understand, is that neither me nor my father have a choice in the matter. Fueling such a temper in both of us is a righteous indignation at injustice, suffering and ingratitude in which we cannot help but take every offense against humanity personally. Everything that happens is related to us somehow - everything gets reduced or expanded to fill the relative positions in which we stand and from which we are able to make comment. I will scream at length about a drop in my tuition funding, and claim that such a drop testifies to a "generational prejudice exercised against young people by the Baby Boomers." My father once said of my great-aunt's husband, without a trace of hyperbole, "That man is everything that is wrong with the world today."
What we define as an offense against humanity and thereby ourselves is unique to each of us, but whenever I find myself in an argument, my demand for some kind of resolution is always motivated by the white-hot fury I can feel burning in my chest.
It is for this reason that I have never been able to understand the disjointed concept of arbitrary debate, discoursing crucial issues for some kind of abstract pleasure where the outcome is irrelevant and the only goal is the process of discussion. I cannot fathom the separation of my theory from my praxis so readily, nor can I endure my rising choler for the sake of an evening's entertainment.
Like my father before me, and, I'm pretty sure, like his father before him, I cannot understand what somebody means when they say, "Don't take it personally."
Everything is personal.
A medieval belief about bears held that they were born as shapeless masses of flesh, needing to be licked into their bear shapes by their mothers' tongues, themselves once shaped from God's amorphous everything-of-nothing stuff.
Though we walk the world as individuals, we are each uniquely shaped by our experiences in it, licked into what we are by what we see and hear and love and believe. We strive for connections to each other, stretching out across time and space to make our individual lives better, more true, more wholesome, more righteous.
And so yesterday morning, after watching the news on the television, my first impulse was to call my father. I was angry, and I knew he'd be angry too.
And then we yelled for awhile, about everything that is wrong with the world today.