Real world and marginalization

[csjhs@eiu.edu (Jeanne H. Simpson)]

James

Reading your post about cowboy poets, thinking about my reactions to
finding that Alpine Texas is getting plumb chic and land prices going
through the roof now that--gasp!--no less a celebrity than Robert James
Waller his own se'f has bought a ranch in the vicinity and taken up being
a cowboy in his spare time. 

But...  chalk it up to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Or maybe menopause. Or
too much caffeine. Or not enough. But I have some whimsical thoughts about
this marginalization business.

You feel marginalized.  I feel marginalized because I'm an administrator
and everybody hates us (though I appreciate the occasional "no, we like
you okay, Jeanne" notes that I get).   Middle aged white males feel
marginalized.  Eighteen-year-old female Urdu poets feel marginalized.

Who's in the middle?   What if nobody is?  What if all of us are on the
margin someplace?  If there is no middle, then...as we look across the
empty space and see the other margin...it will *look* to us like the
middle but isn't.   Or, if there is no one in that space, then, if there
is also empty space outside of us...then all of us on these margins are in
all the middle there is. 

Everybody by now probably knows I really hate that term marginalized.
Venting my spleen here.  Once again, insisting that the language surely
provides us with better, more precise words to describe situations such as
discrimination as opposed to just feeling alienated.  

But meanwhile, I hope the folks in the blizzard out east are digging out
okay, hope Paula has a splendid birthday, hope Jon's was ditto, hope
Katie's was too, and wish everybody a happy new year.

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu