Our Gladiator Culture: On “Grit,” Competition, and Saving Future Generations
my father moved through griefs of joy;…
his shoulders marched against the darkThis place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
While sitting in the ER with my father a few nights ago before he was admitted into the hospitals’ heart center—a few days after my mother’s stroke sending her to another, larger hospital 40-minutes away—I was reminded of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, a novel, among other things, about the abusive power imbalance between men and women.
Late in the novel, Celie explains to her sister Nettie: “Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss ’em, as far as I’m concern, frogs is what they stay.”
The most powerful and imposing man in my life, my father, sat in the ER—stooped, shrunken, pot-bellied, tongue hanging out of his mouth and bowed head like an aged human-sized toad somehow in a wheelchair. My physical and athletic superior who despite my being in my mid-50s and quite successful in my career and my athletic hobby, my father has always cast a shadow, darkening my lingering insecurities and anxieties.
This morning, Father’s Day 2017, I visited my father still in the heart center after spending almost all my time at my mother’s side as the number of Our Gladiator Culture: On “Grit,” Competition, and Saving Future Generations | radical eyes for equity: