Marlene Wagman-Geller

RANT TIME. Customarily, my Facebook posts concern the women I write about in my books that are on the platform of women’s studies. However, on some occasions, I am prompted to discuss different topics when I feel passionate about a subject. The last time I was moved to do so was the mandate that state run schools in the South were required to post the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall. For those who know me, there is little doubt where I stand on the issue. I will leave a link at the bottom of the page for my blog on the cohabiting of religion and state. This morning another topic sounded my interior alarm bell. 

Today is the anniversary of the passing of Janis Joplin; in memorandum, on my Facebook, I included Janis’ chapter from my book Unabashed Women. I shared the chapter on other Facebook pages and was distraught when someone wrote that she was not empathetic to Janis because she died from a drug overdose; moreover, she added, the singer was further reprehensible because she was supporting her family back in Texas.

When I read that response, I was reminded of the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Blaming someone for their drug addiction is analogous to blaming the rape victim.

When I was growing up in the 1950s in Toronto, blame was the name of the game. Those who side- stepped entrenched societal mores had to wear the Scarlett Letter-for adultery, and for far more. Here are some screenshots from my youth. The decade was far removed from Happy Days’ nod to nostalgia.

Homosexuality was, as Lord Alfred Douglas, (Oscar Wilde’s lover) phrased it, “The love that dared not speak its name.” On my street, a couple created a tempest in my Jewish neighborhood when they divorced. Divorced? Unhear of! What further fueled the fire of gossip was the divorce was because the father had moved in with the man with whom he co-owned a downtown antique shop. The tongues did not stop wagging for weeks. Other no-nos were intermarriage-to anyone not Jewish. This mindset is illustrated in the movie, The Jazz Singer, when a father recited the Hebrew prayer for the dead after his son moved in with a shiksa (non-Jewish woman). Oy.

Other victims of societal condemnation were those who suffered from mental or psychological illnesses. My mother was a victim of what was then called manic depression, now labelled bipolar. When she was in the grips of a psychotic breakdown, people called her crazy, made her an object of derision, ostracized her. In contrast, had she been in a wheelchair, the same people would have been utterly solicitous. My brother, who was born with a club foot, had one leg six inches shorter than the other. At recess in my public school, kids made fun of his uneven gait, asked if he were drunk-snicker,  snicker.... A girl in my grade who suffered from obesity received Weight On bars in front of her locker. Good times.

However, society has taken huge strides in acceptance. In lieu of pointing fingers, people often clasp hands. When I first started teaching high school in San Diego, a student went AWOL. A few months later, he visited me after the dismissal bell. I did a triple take. He was wearing heavy make-up, heels, a wig, and long pointed brightly colored nails. In the 1980s, in a school in proximity to the Mexican border where macho ruled the roost, I was taken aback. When I retired a few years ago, the homecoming queen and king were both openly gay. Dylan was right. The times they are a changin-’ until I saw today’s comment.

In the past, alcoholism and drug use were considered moral failures: the substance abuser was weak, lacking in both character and backbone. I had thought that such a mindset had gone the way of the dodo. Addiction is a physical disease, not a moral failure. This was a message that Bill W., the founder of Alcohol Anonymous, tried to impart.  In my book, Still I Rise: The Persistence of Phenomenal Women, Carrie Fisher explained her lifelong arm wrestle with drugs-an opponent far more heinous than the giant alien slug she confronted in her role as Princess Leia. She inherited her propensity for drugs from her famous father, Eddie Fisher, who she called “Puff Daddy” because of his inordinant fondness for marijuana. Carrie’s dependence on drug had originated with her raging bipolar; drugs were her venue for self-medicating. She explained that nothing felt worse than what she was feeling. In the end, the Force was not with Carrie: she died from a cocktail of drugs. When I heard of Carrie’s passing, I felt sorrow, not condemnation that she had succumbed to the siren call of what delivered a temporary escape from her demons.

An ancient liturgical tradition is for a village to ring its church bells whenever one of its members passed away. The villagers mourned their loss, free of judging whether one of their own was a saint or a sinner. Perhaps they did so aware that each of us is an amalgam of both. In a nod to this practice, the seventeenth century British poet, John Donne, wrote an immortal sonnet in which he expressed sorrow, free from judgement, in his famous sonnet of his sorrow at the loss of life, “Therefore, send not to know/ For whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee.”