There is a strange religiosity applied to the concept of family in US culture. I originally started writing “Midwestern US culture,” but most of the examples that come to mind aren’t confined to the Midwest. There’s an entire line of movies (The Fast and The Furious) that is all about the primacy of the family unit, though they tend to define family a bit more broadly than most. There’s entire cultural background covering the importance of The Family as it relates to organized crime. One of the most popular types of stories these days is about found family or the lengths to which one might go to return to family. Family, regardless of how it is defined, is seen as something worth everything and valuable beyond measure. What makes this somewhat more sinister and unpleasant, though, is the suggestion that anyone lacking family is a bad person. Villains are frequently loners. The philosophy of those we’re supposed to dislike is often depicted as favoring isolation and a lack of attachments. Hell, all you have to do is look at advertising and media around the parent-oriented holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to see the subtle suggestion that choosing to ignore your biological parents, or otherwise hold the way they treated you against them, is a moral failing. It’s pervasive.
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Write Anything *In Progress*
They told me I could write anything
And foolishly I believed them.
They ooh’d and aah’d at every word
Does “them” have any non-awful rhymes?
In the years since my accolades
I’ve learned a difficult lesson
Teachers say to write what you know
But I know about as much as Jon Snow
And though I’d hate to let these lines go
They don’t fit into this poem, so…
Writing about only hetero white dudes
Gets super friggin’ boring
If I did only that
All my readers would be snoring
(Turn the above ideas
Into something that fits
The poetic form
Of the previous bits)
Witty lines to point out my growth
That reference a fresh meme
I’ve learned I can’t write everything
So I wrote this poem instead.