20150319.0658

I find it increasingly difficult to be concerned about global affairs. I know I ought to be; they do bear in on my local life more and less directly, and they shape the kinds of things Ms. 8 will face in the years to come. As I noted yesterday, though, I find myself becoming more and more entrenched in a pattern of work that occupies my time and attention more or less fully. The immediate confronts me such that I cannot really attend to the greater affairs of the world--and I cannot meaningfully affect them in any event. I am, after all, an NPC, and not really one of the regularly occurring ones that fit major Jungian archetypes or narrative tropes (although I have been the recurring mentor figure). No, I am the nameless flunky in the back of the shot or the merchant visited once and never again.

This comes to mind not so much to provoke a pity party as out of a reflection on the reading I have been doing for the freelance work. For the most part--although not exclusively, I admit--the works of popular mainstream fiction I have been treating for pay (and thereby neglecting my research and perhaps some creative writing, work that might allow me to become either a higher-tier NPC or perhaps even a PC, but I have to get through the short term to make it to the long term for which I have been told repeatedly I must plan) focus on the deeds and doings of the socioculturally elite. Since most of what I have been reading for the freelance work is set in the United States, that means I have been reading about wealthy characters and their more privileged servitors, those who have the power and influence to set aside both law and prevailing morality (neither in the ways that they perhaps ought to be set aside, but in favor of the things that such strictures seek to prevent) and who enjoy the benefits of doing so. Some of them do end up suffering for their perfidy, but others do not--they frequently do not, in fact.

I have to wonder at the effect on the dominant readership. Claims of "they're just stories" will again arise, I know, but as I have noted and as others have noted more abundantly and eloquently than I, the stories we well and the stories we are told shape our perceptions of the world and thus the ways in which we interact with it. If we are told repeatedly that X type of person is a bad person, when we encounter an example of X type of person, we will react as though that person is bad--whether it is true or not. The reverse is also true. It is therefore well worth considering the kinds of stories we tell and the kinds of stories we are told, and how many and how often we tell and are told each. The worldviews we create for ourselves and with which we equip or burden our children arise from them, and it will not do to have us or them looking for the wrong kind of thing.