Honky
One day, I began calling
my friends “honky”. And all of a sudden, I had a new habit. Admittedly I don’t
even remember why I started. Something was perhaps attractive about somehow reclaiming such a horribly harsh
word. Maybe I was just trying to be stupid - always a favorite pastime of mine.
But “why” was, and still is, not the point.
Much later, when I was hanging
out with my family, my uncle overheard me call my brother “honky”, and he
said “Oooh. You don’t want to be using that word.”
“Why not?”
“Well, do you know where
it comes from?”
“No”.
So this is what he told me.
I don’t know if it’s really true, and actually I don’t care, because it was and is
priceless.
He told me that back in
the Old South, when a man was looking for love – the kind you have to pay for,
but he was too poor to hire a white prostitute, he would drive down to a poor
black neighborhood. He wouldn’t get out of his car, because he knew the
brothers on the street would kick his ass. So he would pull up in front of the
prostitute’s house, and stay in the driver’s seat, and honk and honk on his
horn, until she came out and got in the car with him, and they drove away. That’s
where the term “honky” comes from.
“Wow”, I said, “you’re
right. That is horrible.”
But then, after a few
days, I thought, “Hold on. That’s the Perfect word.”
That’s how so many of us obtain
so many of the objects of our desires. We drive down into the poorest of the
world’s neighborhoods. We’re afraid to get out of our cars, so we stay in the driver’s
seat, and honk and honk on our horns until the object of our desire gets in,
and we drive away.
Except that these days,
for the most part, we’re not even aware that we’re doing it. It’s like we’re not
only Honkies, we’re Clueless Honkies.
I began to realize that
the Clueless Honky is like a club, but the strangest club of all time. It’s not
a club that you have to get admittance into, but a club you have to get
admittance out of.
In the sense that the first step to
get out of the club is to admit that one is in the club.
(Hand in the air). Hello,
I am Chris Farmer. And I am a Clueless Honky. I eat food that I don’t know
where it comes from. I am heavily addicted to the fractional distillation of
petroleum. I wear clothes and shoes and use electronic gadgets that are made very,
very, very far away.
How did I get myself into
this mess where my life is dependent on things to which I just don’t know how
to give thanks?
Well, that’s not an easy
question to answer. But over time, this is what I’ve come up with:
I noticed how we humans are
such creatures of story. And I began wondering if we got in this mess because
we lack a coherent enough creation story. And by creation story, I mean one of
those Big stories that for eons people told themselves, and that answered the
really big questions in life – who are we as human beings, where are we, and
why are we here – and that, in essence, explains how we are connected to the
source of our lives.
Because it sure seems to
me that to have unwittingly become a clueless honky, I must have lacked a clear
sense of who I was, where I was, and why I was here. I must have lacked a clear
sense of my connection to the source of my life.
To get another
perspective on how this plays out – how lacking a coherent creation story –
plays out, I want to go back a couple of hundred years and look at an
intellectually and morally luminous person we’ve all heard of – Thomas
Jefferson.
Now, Jefferson found
himself in a similar predicament – that of his life being dependent on things
to which he didn’t know how to give thanks.
As is well known,
Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence which included
these famous words: “We hold these truths to be self evident- that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“
As is less well known,
Jefferson was also the author of Notes on Virginia, actually the only
book he ever published. These, too, are his words: “The blacks, whether
originally a distinct race, or made distant by time and circumstances, are
inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”
What allowed, and
continues to allow, this kind of confusion, these kinds of ridiculous
justifications for the unjustifiable, even from one such as Jefferson?
I wondered, if your
creation story doesn’t help you make sense of the tricky stuff in life, well
then, you just start filling in the blanks, so to speak, and you wind up
creating ridiculous justifications for the unjustifiable, instead of dealing honestly
and directly with the tricky stuff. And that’s what we’ve been doing for longer
than anyone can remember.
And then, as time went by
and as technology allowed, we hid – or exported – the unjustifiable way out beyond
the horizon of our lived experience. Or, in other words, we made a slow transition
- from slaveholders to Clueless Honkies.
And I also wonder whether
or not the creation stories that we do have within our culture – I wonder if
they are too infected with “guilt, sin, and blame” – what John Trudell called the “Trinity of the Chain” – for them to ever do us any good. Because it’s
almost unbearable to deal honestly and directly with anything we feel guilty
about, or that we’re blaming others for, and so we therefore never truly learn
from the big mistakes our species is prone to make.
So I propose that it’s
time that we create a new creation story – a story that can help us “admit”
ourselves out of the Club of the Clueless Honky.
I’d love to go ahead and recommend
three design parameters for just such a creation story. First design parameter – my dream
is that it would be a “frame” story that could hold an infinite number of
stories within it. Kind of like the “1001 Arabian Nights”. Maybe not quite as
explicit as where the main story is of a woman telling one unfinished story
night after night. But, nonetheless, where the main story could fit an almost
infinite number of individual’s open-sourced stories within its broad central
theme.
Second, the main frame
story would actually already exist and would already be at the least somewhat familiar
to most folks, like it was some kind of sleeper story that just needed to be
slightly tweaked and awakened to reveal its full potential. Doing this –
revitalizing an old story - would avoid any kind of potential cult of personality
surrounding the author of any new creation story.
Third, the frame story
would answer not only who we are, where we are, and why we are here, but would also
elucidate our connection to the source of our lives in such a way that it would
answer, without resorting to any guilt, sin, and blame - how did we become such
Clueless Honkies, and how do we get ourselves out of this stupid club?
I have a suggestion
for just such a story that would meet all of these design parameters.
Check out the next
Clueless Honky Blog post for more.
Thanks for your time and
attention
