Emancipation is Messy

Photo: Blood Red Peony

When I worked at Public Health Nursing in Indianapolis, I was sitting one day on the stairway with a teen in our Independent Living Program.  The teen was in foster care and facing what they call, with no small irony in my view, "emancipation."  For big city African American kids seperated early from birth families, sometimes bearng scars from abuse, sometimes just a blank space of bewilderment at absence--this dubious emancipation from a system that held them in often equally abusive limbo is nearly unthinkable.  They are not prepared for adult life and the world of adults is not prepared for them.  The program was a small attempt to ready these young people for yet another harsh reality. It was lamentably small and maddeningly late. 

The story of those young people and what I learned from them warrants a book but what I am interested in here is this moment on the stairway.  I was not well, anemic, in pain and still working. The director--a nurse now managing million dollar budgets instead of millions of charts--saw my pallor and asked if I was okay.  I said I was--just not up to par and joked that "the best of life is messy, right?"  She was nonplussed, repeated my words and chuckled, saying "No, I never thought of it that way. I don't like messy."  And I could tell she did not. 

I had thought that a nurse would understand that the body was an inherantly messy thing--even more so in it's thriving--that of working waste organs, birth and menstruation and sex.  She thought of messes as unsanitary--laden with bacteria and risk.  It took me a while to figure this out--that nurses may actually be in their work to clean up the mess, not accept it and heal it. To be fair, theirs is a dicey business and cleanliness is one of the most potent aids to healing ever discovered.  I just found it intriguing--a glimpse of the paradox of mess. 

I remember a particularly junky little motorcycle repair shop that nestled in the crook of a park area here in Bloomington.  It often had vintage frames, tires and fenders piled in sepia-toned scatterings around the parking lot.  I once sat in that park on a WPA-era limestone picnic table with an anthropology class, discussing politics and springtime while eyeing the jamboree of metal and peeled paint across the road.  I drove by it weekly on my way to study Tibetan Buddhism in old house renovated into the bright yellows, oranges, and blues of the Himalayan sky.  It was a part of my landscape.   Like an the old farmer I once met who wore 3 pairs of overalls, chewed tobacco and had built his home from salvage, board by board--it was unique, a bit smelly and highly practical.

When the city finally fixed its gaze and dollar bills and regulatory desires upon the park, it took only a few months to render that jumbled elbow in the road into a flat spot with a bit of parking.  A friend one day sighed, finally they got that ugly place out of here.

Personally, I mourn the loss of its untidiness.  I suspect the urge to tidiness to be counter to life.  Filth, raw sewage, uncleaned wounds, rancid containers--these are health hazards. And, most probably, this "business" did not have green practices--no doubt the motor oil (at least in decades past) had been conveniently poured into the very soil that filtered the rain into a creek entains yelping, wiggling children in it's winding cascades. And yet....was it really that bad?  Or did it simply not fit in with an aesthetic that had encroached upon it across the years as it went about the work it always had--fixing the old stuff.

It's more the mix I worry about.  I just read an article warning that we may be disinfecting our species into a an unprecedented vulnerability to the microscopically potent--a vulnerability that could reneder us without any defense at all.  In our frenzy of reaction to any "germ" we reveal our defensive array again and again to intruders who adapt in a literal heartbeat.

The excuse for bludgeoning peaceful protests out of parks and campuses this fall 2011 was that they were messy--maybe unsanitary (a challenge they had carefully prepared to meet), full of drug addicts and homeless people.  I despairingly noted in a recent aside "How dare those Occupy people provide a visible place for our sick and homeless to die instead leaving them to the underpasses where we don't have to see them?"

Because that's what messiness does for me and I daresay it does for you, too--it makes visible that real stuff of life.  Salvage yards are not so pretty but is the buried waste heap really safer as it plows the toxins into the soil our aquifer silts through?  Too often what we call "unsanitary" is simply an aesthetic codified.  The mansions' antibiotics and hormones flushed tidily into our rivers and lakes are more likely to kill me than the worms in the unsprayed apple. 

Emancipation from our cultural blind spots is likely to be a messy business. These public square movements certainly are:  We may sit in inconvenient places to get the work done, we may not look so pretty as we push ourselves to be there, even on a bad hair day. And its naive, of course--reinventing the clinic in front of the fast food joint, deciding a dress code for sleeping in a public place. Emancipation may drag forward into the tidy but empty public square what has been eschewed too long:  The noise of equals in negotiation they are unaccustomed to. The awkward lurch of a people told they needn't dance, just watch the professionals on the screen.

Some friends of mine are documenting what they call "Bloomington Fading"--the old buildings from the past that, with faded eaves and failing roofs are disappearing one by one from our once small town.  In their stead, all too often, are parking lots, industrial cubes, roadways full of cars. I'm no romantic for the home that needs repair--I've been cold and wet in my own home a bit too much for that.  What's ugly here is when we write the aesthetic of the wealthy into code, calling it public health (but not funding health publicly) when it's really just a matter of convenience and a preference for the shiny new.

Bloomington Fading:  Once a Dr.'s office now a parking lot for Taco Bell

One thing I learned from those emancipated kids:  Once freed from the system of "care," they always went "home" to their mothers and fathers, just to see, to know what it was they came from, to claim back the messiness of their own story.  They often couldn't/didn't stay, but they weren't ever sorry they did that--look for their "terrible," "incompetent," ramshackle parents and figure out if they could love them.  What does that tell you?

Photo:Blaine Hogan

It tells me that we don't really know messy.