I'm A Marginal Person

I live on the margins. I’m a marginal, a shadow creature, one of those who most people don’t even know exist, or are only vaguely aware of. I identify with all the other marginal – and marginalised - beings, who inhabit the world that lies beyond the harsh glare of nine-to-five, two-point-five mortgages, two-point-five kids and the house in the burbs. You know – the ‘normal’ world, inhabited by the straight white, cis, hetero, able-bodied, neurotypical, married, everyday people. Like you see on TV, in ads and programs and movies and so on. Normal people.

Please understand, I have nothing against them, I don’t dislike them or anything, in fact I find many of them fine people. I just don’t identify with them, and I can barely comprehend what it might be like to be them. And I guess they don’t really understand people like me either.

Us, that is. The not-so-normal ones. The socially rejected or scorned or ignored. The outsiders and the strangers and the simply ‘strange’. The autistics, the ADHDers, the dyslexic and the dyspraxic and the whole shebang of neurological ‘difference’. The gays and the dykes, the bis and the pans, the trans men and women, the aces and the aros and the happy-to-be-singles, the demis and greys and enbies and queers and all the rest. Or, for that matter, those who are not whiter than whitey-white, the immigrants, the disabled and chronically ill, the poor, the welfare beneficiaries, the homeless, the addicts and the mentally ill, not to mention the writers and artists and musicians and other creative types, and hell, even the hippies and nomads and rebels of all stripes, in fact pretty much anyone who finds their reality is not included in this supposedly wonderful ‘Norm’.

I don’t mean that I, personally, am all of these things (though I am quite a few of them), or that I know what it’s like to be all of these things. I mean that I most emphatically know the experience of being ‘not mainstream’, of being outside that norm, and so I empathise far more with these groups, collectively, than I do with the ‘normals’.

I also understand that many fall outside the norm in only one way, and wouldn’t consider themselves ‘marginal’ or even perhaps ‘marginalised’, and possibly are fighting to be included in the mainstream. How much any given individual feels marginalised tends to vary according to how many non-mainstream attributes you have. One, and you may reject any idea of being ‘marginal’. Lots, and you’ve usually given up on normal. Some don’t even care about it anymore, and some positively relish their marginal status. While if you have just a few attributes, you could be anywhere in-between. It’s a very individual thing, and no-one has the right to tell another how they should see themselves, or who they should identify with, or how they should live their life.

But all of us on the margins - beyond the boundaries of ‘normal’, in one way or another, and sometimes in multiple ways, being pushed further and further out beyond the back of beyond, in the eyes of ‘normals’ anyway - we inhabit our own universe. In that universe (or perhaps it’s a variety of different universes?), we connect, sometimes, with each other, and fail to at other times. We network, and fight, and disagree, and fall apart, and carry on anyway.

And our lives, our universes, are all too often invisible to the ‘normals’.  If they do encounter us, they sometimes refuse to acknowledge that our lives are actually different to theirs. “But everyone feels like that sometimes.” “Aren’t we all a little bit autistic?” “What do you mean, you don’t like sex/romance? Everybody wants a partner!” “I’d kill myself if I had your life.” “He/she’s just making a joke, it’s not really racism/sexism/homophobia.” “Non-binary? That’s not even a thing!” “But you’re in our country now, you should speak English.” And so on, and so forth.

But we know. We know our own truths. We live them. We know our day to day struggles are real – everything from wheelchair access to sensory overwhelm to pain management, from the lack of services to the lack of acceptance to the many micro-aggressions. And sometimes not-so-micro aggressions. We know it. Does it make us better people? Maybe. Sometimes. And sometimes not. All too many of us are simply left bitter, angry, hurt, sad and reeling away from the world. And even if we are stronger for it, I think most of us would still rather go without all the stuff we went through to get there.

Because we’re stressed out. It’s not fun to feel excluded, to never or rarely see our lives depicted in movies or on TV or in books or even just in a damn ad. (And why are so many movies and TV shows, even now, about The White Male Experience, especially the whole white-male-saving-the-day thing? I could write a whole book on this one, and no doubt someone already has. But do the movie and TV people ever think that even many of those who are white, might like to see something, y’know, different?)

Anyway, all this feeling invisible, ignored, overlooked, not valued or recognised, being the recipient of all sorts of bad treatment - prejudice, stereotypes, belittling, rejection, misunderstanding, mocking, ridicule or even outright violence – none of it is fun. But it happens. And it happens so often, and even if we complain about it, it’s obvious that the ‘normals’ don’t much care, really.

And that’s what cuts.

It’s not being different that’s the problem. It’s how others respond to us. We are what we are. Whether we hate it, love it, simply accept it or just wish we weren’t in a particular category, we are these things. And can’t be anything else. So why shouldn’t we feel pride in what we are? Why shouldn’t there be gay pride, indigenous rights movements, multi-cultural celebrations, autistic pride? Why should we not campaign for recognition, for human rights, for acceptance, and so on?

And what’s wrong with being different? Why are so many insistent we all be the same? What’s so great about being all alike? Why do the normals get to decide what we should aspire to, and why do they think they’re so wonderful that we should all be copying them anyhow? Did it ever occur to them that we just wanna be our own goddam selves, and not copies of them?

And I can’t help wondering, in the midst of this Covid crisis, whether it’s going to change anything for us. For most of my life, when I’ve looked around, I’ve seen a world increasingly skewed towards the superficial, the self-serving, the frenetically materialistic, and all too often the simply nonsensical. But this crisis has forced a change in many (apart from the usual idiots of course), it might even be that some serious changes will happen.

Our Prime Minister, Jacinda of international fame, has repeatedly urged us to ‘be kind’. And certainly there has been a surge of public-spiritedness evident, along with the Zoom conferences, the gee-we-can-work-efficiently-from-home-after-all, the endless hand washing and the social-distance-at-the-supermarket thing. But has this kindness been extended to real understanding and support for us marginal people? (Was it ever really anyway, except as patronising acts of inspo-porn, or other ‘feel-good’ exercises?) Will there be a wholesale change in how we’re seen? Or will this new-found public milk of human kindness vanish along with the need for hand sanitiser?

Who knows?

But whatever shape the future takes, one thing is certain – that I’m a marginal person, and always will be. The marginalised are my people, my tribe, and I’m happy with that, even if I’m not happy with how we’re treated.

How do you identify?

A Word About Baby Boomers

Something which lately has begun to make me really mad, is how often baby boomers get blamed for so much by younger generations. It seems they look around, see the world in a mess, realise that many of the world’s leaders are of my generation, and go “oh, it must be all the baby boomers’ fault!”

Ah, no. We didn’t create this world, we inherited it, and blaming us for the state of the world is like blaming someone for the state of a 400-year-old house they’ve been left. Maybe if more of the previous generations were still around, you’d be dumping on them too. But they’re not, so it all – unfairly – lands on us.

So, for the record, let’s look at some of those accusations.

SOCIAL CHANGE. Boomers are often described as ‘entitled’. ‘Confident’ is actually a better word. When we were young, we looked at our parents’ world and found it stodgy, straitlaced and restrictive. We thought we not only could, but should, change the world. It’s no coincidence that a whole heap of fervent social movements cranked into high gear around the time we started coming to young adulthood, everything from feminism to gay rights to black power and indigenous rights. (What? You thought the baby boom was only a white, middle-class, American thing?) And yes, I know that plenty older than us fought too, just as some of us didn’t, but we had the numbers and the youthful fervour to carry things through.

Ever enjoyed a women’s/indigenous/black studies course? Gay and married? Out and proud? A single woman who’s adopted a child or taken out a mortgage, or married and didn’t have to ask your husband for permission to start a business or take out a loan? Used the services of a rape crisis centre, sexual health service, or battered women’s shelter? Pierced a ‘glass ceiling’, or forged a career in a field not traditional for your gender? A stay at home dad? These and many more are things my generation fought for. You’re welcome.

And that struggle, the sheer societal and political inertia, was way more immense than anyone younger than about fifty can now imagine. It wasn’t even the active right-wing push-back of recent years, but rather a total ignoring or just blocking of us, no doubt in the hope that we’d just go away. The sheer energy it took to chip away at this, year after year after year, saw many of our finest burn out. And no, we’re not asking for a medal or anything, but we certainly didn’t expect that forty years later, younger generations would turn around and call us ‘selfish’.

TECHNOLOGY. I recently saw a post sneering about a female baby boomer who was obviously something of a technophobe, and the implication seemed to be that all of us are. Nope. You want technophobes? Look at my parents’ generation, in their 80s and 90s if they’re still alive. And personally, though I’m hardly a genius or geek, if I get my hands on any new tech, I can usually figure out how to use it without much trouble. Several years back, for instance, I sussed out my mother’s new cellphone in about fifteen minutes – by the time she died, she still hadn’t figured out how to even check her texts. She wasn’t alone in this, and I’m not alone in being a baby boomer good with technology either.

And please remember, a lot of this technology was invented or developed by baby boomers. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are or were all boomers, and goodness knows how many of those early technicians, programmers, and other inventors were of our generation too. Quite a few, I should imagine.

ECONOMY. Despite what some think, we didn’t single-handedly create the current destructive economy.  Capitalism has been around for centuries, and the toxic mess that is modern neo-liberalism was dreamt up before boomers were even born. And it was during the 80s, under leaders like Thatcher (UK), Reagan (US), Bob Hawke (Australia) and David Lange and Roger Douglas (NZ) – NONE of whom were boomers – that these policies were put into practise. Plenty of us protested and campaigned against those policies, alas fruitlessly, and now it’s considered ‘business as usual’. NOT. OUR. FAULT.

As for whether some of us are now ‘plundering the world’s economic resources’ to feather our retirement nest, a few might be, but let me assure you, way more of us are in the struggling or desperate classes. And a lot of the most obscenely rich aren’t actually of our age cohort - of the top ten, only Bill Gates (1955), and Bernard Arnault (1949) are definitely boomers. (Jeff Bezos, born in 1964, is only marginally one.) And of those boomers who are ‘plunderers’, they’re not doing it because they’re boomers, but because they’re rich people doing what rich people always do, given the opportunity. Seems like lots of people are just in it for themselves these days, and you can thank those neo-liberals for that.

In a world where our numbers mean not only has the economy grown (as it tends to do with a larger population), we’re perhaps more visible, and the wealth of the wealthiest boomers more bloatedly huge, so it seems like we’re everywhere. Plenty of us don’t like them anymore than you do. I for one would gladly see those obscene inequalities disappear.

ENVIRONMENT. FYI, we didn’t single-handedly destroy the environment either. The damage that’s starting to be really visible now, is the result of trends that began long before we were born (think Victorian factories belching smoke, rivers choking with pollution long before World War Two, plastic introduced while we were still babies). Rachel Carson’s seminal book ‘Silent Spring’ was published in **1962**, when even the oldest of us were barely in high school.

To take just one environmental issue as an example – New Zealand has a problem with its old rubbish tips. We have a long coastline, and in the past, local councils have used many pockets of it to dump rubbish in. Just this year, one of these old tips, previously thought safely capped, was washed out during a storm, and the clean-up is still underway months later. And it’s just one of many such former tips around the country which are now threatened by rising sea levels – and most of which date back before we were even born. Get the picture?

I grew up in a world where the height of environmental consciousness was being a ‘tidy Kiwi’ and picking up our litter. A lot of us moved on from there, joining Greenpeace, marching for a nuclear-free zone, some even became back-to-the-land hippies. Speaking strictly for myself (though I know I’m not alone in this), I’ve been ‘reducing, reusing, recycling’, not to mention composting, since long before it got fashionable. I consciously work on ways to further reduce my impact on the planet, as I’m quite sure many others do.

We may not have done as much as younger people would like, but we’ve not been idle either. And though I can’t prove it, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that real efforts to clean up the environment have only begun as we’ve gotten older and at least some of us have gathered power and influence. If those efforts aren’t going to be enough, blame those Victorian factory owners, the 20^th century industrialists, the generations who created those sorry rubbish tips, and everyone who ignored all the warnings as far back as the 60s. The damage is cumulative, and the world has certainly reached a tipping point, but humankind has been ruining the planet for the last two hundred years, there’s no way you can put all the blame on us.

POPULATION. I’ve even seen assertions that we’re also to blame for the falling birth rate in Western countries. (Supposedly, we’re too selfish to have kids. Never mind that many of us, including me, have.) But the birth rate has actually been steadily falling in most of the developed world for over a century, the baby boom was actually just a temporary blip in this. It’s an inevitable process, that as a country becomes more industrialised, religion loses its grip, improved medical care ensures greater infant survival, and people can get their hands on better birth control, family sizes always shrink. It’s worth noting that it was our parents’ generation who were the first to use the Pill, which in many countries was initially for married women only.

CHARACTER. Every time someone of my generation is rude or selfish or whatever, it’s blamed on them being a baby boomer, not just because they’d be a nasty person whichever year they happened to be born in. We’re not perfect, but all the worst traits we display I can see in other generations too. We vary in our politics – yes, the Trumpf is technically a baby boomer (b 1946), but so is Obama (b 1961), and let’s face it, Trump would be an arrogant, narcissistic arsehole whatever generation he was born into. Andrew Wakefield is a boomer, but so is one of his major opponents and critics, Dr Paul Offit, and anti-vaxxers seem to be mainly of childbearing age. And need I point out that it’s not my generation who’ve brought back the Nazis and made them socially acceptable in at least some quarters? Personally, I’m as horrified as any else is by that, as are many of us who grew up when ‘Nazi’ was the worst insult and the ultimate evil.

Being greater in numbers may mean we’re more visible, but we’re still just human. A lot of the things said about us seem to basically boil down to ‘I hate that there are so many of you’, which is of course nothing we can help! And that many of those who did the biggest damage are now gone or going is no excuse for jumping all over us!

I’m hoping I don’t sound apologetic here, because I refuse to apologise for the year I was born in. We are not The Enemy, not some kind of malevolent selfish force hell-bent on using up the world’s resources for itself, and to hell with the future. So please, stop blaming us for everything bad about the world. That’s as ridiculous as blaming everything on millennials. It’s a prejudice, a kind of ‘ism’, and like all such, it’s intended to shame and silence an entire group, and alienate anyone who might take their part. And that’s not on. Quit with the hate. We’re all in this world together, and we all bear the responsibility of making it better.