One Fine Celebration Tamales, high notes, trail vows and a wolfish ring-bearer BY MARY O'BRIEN JOSH AND LAURA Last week, Laura Saxe and my son Josh had a lot more fun getting married than I did 38 years ago. I had followed all the rules. The virgin Mary walked down the aisle in a white dress (albeit a short cotton one). At the end of that aisle stood my United Presbyterian minister father; four bridesmaids in matching flowered dresses; and four grooms and my fiancé, O'B, all in suits. After the church service, in which my father gave a sermon he had given in other weddings, everyone got a piece of white-frosted cake and lemonade. O'B and I did do one thing we really wanted to do that day: in the late afternoon we headed out to begin an eight-week camping trip hat would end in Madison, Wisc., for graduate school. Pregnant Laura and Josh, on the other hand, did everything they wanted to for their three-day, 50-guest beach wedding on the Oregon Coast. The day before the wedding, Josh and Laura hiked with us along an estuary, crossed the spit beside a patch of endangered Western lilies, and returned by beach in time for steamed tamales Josh had brought up from Davis. "Oh," a gas station attendant had asked him when he saw Josh's steamer. "Do you play in one of those steel bands?" "Well, actually it's a tamale steamer for a wedding," Josh answered. "Do you cater weddings?" the attendant tried again hopefully. "Well, actually it's my wedding," Josh added. "Boy, someone is getting a good catch!" he concluded triumphantly. The night before the wedding we had a competition to decorate six small cakes. The team of Laura's outrageous Aunt Jane from Mexico won the "cheesiest" award, with its miniature brides, grooms and champagne glasses. My team won the "most spiritual" award with its array of grass flowering heads and rose petals hijacked from the front yard. The morning of the wedding Josh led another hike to Cape Lookout. My African-American nephew from Washington, D.C., wondered aloud about whether he would see something unusual, and said he'd heard that bald eagles have three-foot wingspans. A few minutes later he spotted six seals far below, and a bald eagle soared above our heads. A Peruvian-Mexican friend of Laura's has a license from the Internet to perform marriages, so she started the wedding by explaining the agenda. First Aunt Jane and Laura's mother Barbara would sing "Ash Grove." I don't know whether it was the damp air or emotion, but Aunt Jane crashed twice on the high notes with endearing hilarity. Then folks could tell stories about Josh and Laura. No one knew this was coming, so there wasn't a polished story among them, but each was memorable. Biology graduate student Jim Martin played guitar and sang a song he and one of Laura's friends had written 45 minutes earlier. "Laura, Laura, what you gonna do?" introduced each verse, which was about Josh regularly turning up late, cooking dinner slowly, and taking most of the night to eat. Laura and Josh next told stories about each other. Laura told how when they first began to live together five years ago, Josh had not paid much attention to her border collie, Jackson, because he's a domestic animal. Once she reminded him that this was a descendant of wolves, Jackson entered Josh's heart. Josh told of listening to Laura sing softly one night when she thought he was asleep, and of dancing recently in an all-too-rare Davis rain. And vows. "Jackson," Laura called to her wolf descendent, who made his way up to Laura from among the rest of us. Tied in his red neckerchief were two silver rings. Jackson stood patiently looking up at his two friends as they announced their intention to live together the rest of their lives. Josh and Laura promised (among other things) to walk hand in hand along a thousand trails in the woods (Josh's passion) and watch basketball games together (Laura's). After our home-cooked dinner, a number of us stood together on the beach, watching seals, seagulls and pelicans mob fish as the evening darkened. Worlds — human, domestic and wild — had all been married during this one, fine celebration. It had followed all the truly essential rules. Mary O'Brien of Eugene has worked as a public interest scientist since 1981. She can be reached at mob@efn.org     CRASHing the Matrix Reducing ISM-induced delusions in Eugene BY MARK HARRIS The new movie Crash, set in today's Los Angeles, depicts what I referred to in my interview ("We're All Infected," EW 12/23/04): We are all infected with the memetic virus of racism. A meme is described as a virus of the mind. Like their biological cousins, memes are transmitted through any mode of human communication, and they mutate. Simply stated, an ISM meme is transmitted through the English language, affecting your ability to see others as part of your human family and act accordingly. Think of ISMs like a form of herpes virus that attacks the underlying structure of humanity. Herpes infections like chicken pox cause inflammation and delusions, and destroy the integrity of healthy tissue. ISMs and their resulting systems of discrimination destroy the unity underlying any perceptible human differences: Class(ism), Race(ism), Addiction, Ability, Sex(ism), Heterosex(ism) (CRASH model, Calalang, Harris 2001). I describe ISM (Individual Societal Structural Mentality) as a mentality that is vectored and incorporated through every structure in society and infects individuals. For every ISM there is an "invisible" structure of privilege supporting it — invisible in the sense that you are not meant to see it in operation, but you can train yourself to see it, much like seeing rain in your headlights at night, or dust in a dark room when you use a flashlight. It's always there; you simply need the right tool to see it. Individuals can reduce their ISM-induced delusions through a process of self-education and self-actualization. Outside of prison, few men worry about the risk of being sexually assaulted walking across a parking lot to their car at night. For many women, it is a real possibility. Male privilege, which is part of the system of sexism, keeps men from seeing their hidden advantage in this regard. Intersexed people are about 1 to 3 percent of human births currently. On this continent and in Africa before European contact, persons displaying the resulting sexual diversity held integral, often sacred roles in their societies. That they don't in this society is evidence of heterosexual privilege. When Rush Limbaugh was found to have an illegal three-year supply of a prescription drug that he was addicted to (a felony), was he arrested? In this case you see the intersection of four kinds of privilege: male, white race, upper class, pharmaceutical addiction. If he had been of color, female, poor and in possession of a three-day supply of any street drug, would his legal treatment be the same? Would he be treated the same at any rehabilitation center in America? No.   I am from L.A., unabashedly, proudly. That city was founded before most of America. There were 44 "founding fathers," and only three of them were white. The white people weren't considered illegal or superior. As part of Mexico, slavery would be made illegal; slaves would be freed long before they were free in America, by a black-Indian president who was a former slave. When Alta California was forcibly brought into the U.S. and English became the official language, race relations changed dramatically. I'm not suggesting that English is the only language that vectors ISMs, but it spreads the ones we are most familiar with here. In the movie Crash, you see the personal devil's bargain that everyone in the film makes with every level of racism: overt individual (Type I), covert individual (Type II), unconscious institutional (Type III), legal conscious institutional (Type IV), illegal conscious institutional (Type V) and socio-structural violence (Type VI). Different skills and strategies are needed to deal with an individual who is discriminating against you for their own personal reasons (Types I and II), or who is discriminating against you as part of an organization or institution (Types III-VI). Einstein once described what we'd call ISMs as an "optical delusion of consciousness." He wrote, "This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty." Mark Harris is an instructor and substance abuse prevention coordinator at Lane Community College.
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