A Time to Laugh

I love gardening. Well, I love it in the Spring. And the Fall. I just about hate it in the South Carolina heat.

We did our spring planting last week — just in time for this week’s frost. Doh! We lost a few tulips, but we didn’t lose the tomatoes I foolishly planted too soon. And I grew these babies from seed. Brandywines!

But every time I go out in the backyard the same thing hits me.

We bought four creeping figs last year for our new wall. We had talked to a green-thumb-friend about it. We consulted our gardening books. We went to the best nursery in the city. We asked the people there for advice. We planted them carefully and watered them regularly. We did everything right.

They died. Well, all but one. And my first knee-jerk response is “It’s my fault. I didn’t work hard enough.”

I walk past the Space Bags at Target. I have about a dozen of these already at home. None of them work. Not one. And I think, “It’s my fault that they don’t work. I didn’t try hard enough.” And I have to stop myself out loud (”Keep moving, Camille!”) to walk away and not buy more. Capitalism thrives on this kind of egocentric self-loathing.

I find a bag of moldy pumpernickel in the pantry. Pangs of guilt shoot through my body. “Why did I let this happen? I’m not careful enough.”

Fundamentalism taught me this. “No doubt the trouble is with you,” right? Well, living in an abusive ideology taught me this. And it’s not just my previous life. There are countless examples. The hyper-focus on sin and an obsession with humility is a tactic for control, not a command from Christ. It’s too egocentric to be from Christ.

As I read these early contemporary conservative evangelical books, I realize that this ideology — whatever I should call it — reduces the entire person to the will. There is no body or even gut or heart — no “dreams and bones.” Just a will. You either choose to do right or you choose to do wrong. That’s all there is to it. An on-off switch. Simple compliance. And every problem can be explained away as such. If you can’t do the right thing, you have too weak of a will. If you can’t stop doing the wrong thing, your will is too strong. Back and forth — same old Keswick crazy-maker.

You see, ’cause no doubt the trouble may not be me. The world doesn’t rise and fall on my making simple choices. Take the creeping figs. Maybe the sun is too hot in that spot. Maybe the soil is bad. Maybe the plants are diseased. Maybe the bugs got ‘em. Maybe they were just cursed. Whatever it is, it’s not all about me.

And gardening forces this very product-oriented INFJ to throw caution to the wind a little bit. It forces me to stop the habits-for-the-sake-of-habits and think about what works. “Well, the petunias didn’t work here, so let’s try them over there. Or forget them altogether. Let’s get azaleas. Carrots taste bad in this red clay, so I’m not planting them again!” Habits are not a virtue. And when I reduce myself or when I’m reduced to mere habits — mere will — I’m no longer acting, but simply just moving.

Besides, I can plant and I can water. But come on now, God gives the growth. Inch by inch. It’s not all about me.

For the last several years, my main motivator for those deep-down personal things that would probably go unnoticed to the world at large has been self-loathing. Egocentric self-loathing. I would (can I use the past tense for this?) actually shame myself into sticking with a particular habit, telling myself that I don’t deserve any different.

Stupid. I admit that it’s stupid. But I have to get it out in the open to work past it. It’s not the way I was raised. And it’s taken this long to realize that what I endured 10-15 years ago is the same thing I’m reading about in my project and that pushed us out the door of fundamentalism. It’s a pair of book ends around a multi-volume set.

Sigh. . . .

I found some brown romaine in the vegetable crisper drawer today. And slimy cilantro. So into the new composter it goes. It’s really invigorating to do that, you know? Turning slime into black gold. Composting is like grace for garbage. ;) Turning my failures into the best fertilizer for the flowers.

Now if I could just find a composter for these Space Bags.

But even in my re-telling this wanting-to-be-forgotten story, it’s revealing to find the persistent theme: God gave me good roots. Grant was my ally. He reassured and loved on me. My brother, too, was a reliable friend — honest but gentle. My dad was also a rock — ever the cheerleader.

But who was there reading, listening, comforting, reminding, dragging, and even nagging me all the way through? Who remembered the deep-down-all-of-me before the seeds of that abusive ideology took root?

My dear mother.

We were talking the other day. Mom had read my church’s newsletter from this month and had noticed their support for CEF. My church and my parents’ new church, too, sponsor Good News Clubs at nearby public elementary schools. They even send kids to C.Y.I.A — CEF’s training for summer missionaries.

I was in C.Y.I.A. back in the day with no small amount of skepticism and criticism from the fundamentalists around us. My parents ignored it and so I did too. It had been a terrific experience for me. Instead of taking it all in, I was giving back. And it was when I was 16-year-old C.Y.I.A. summer missionary while teaching a little disabled child in my 5-Day Club that Jesus loved her that I really, truly realized (again) that Jesus loved me too.

Mom has said more than once in this mutual transition which moved us out of fundamentalism: “After all this time, I finally don’t feel at constant odds with my church’s philosophy. What took us so long?”

I guess we really never were fundamentalists, were we? ;)

What a day that was, punkin. The day you were born.

Just this week you are starting to correctly say “milk” (instead of “rilk”), but “firetruck” is still something I’d rather we didn’t talk about in polite company.  You demand a kiss, a squeeze hug, and a ‘nuggle at every parting. You told me this morning that eating bugs was “gistuskin’” [disgusting]. You still closely identify with Yoshi and Caillou. And you can answer your first catechism question very clearly. ;)

Your favorite joke is:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Goats. [Ghost]

Goats who?

Goats to show my name you know. [Goes to show you that you don't know my name.]

You’re a magpie. You swipe little, little tiny things and the more the better. Dice, pennies, a tiny playmobil cell phone. . . . Your dad and I wonder what God will do with this curiosity in the future.

Right this minute, you’re in my lap, snuggling my “chets” [chest] and forcing us to rock back and forth. “You’re my Mommy.” you say, as you cut your eyes.

We love you, Gavin. Happy Birthday. Stolat! May you have a 100 more!

You know what they say: when you have a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Well, when you have a blog, everything becomes a blog post.

In reading all this stuff from the 70s-80s-and-90s iteration of conservative Evangelicalism, I’ve had more than a few demons to exorcise. And one I’ve been intentionally avoiding talking about here. I just don’t want to think about it because the tears come too easily. I want to forget it. Ignore it. Hope it goes away. And so . . . I think, then, that I really should talk about it.

::deep breath::

It all came to a head 10 years ago just before my 30th birthday. But it started about 5 years before that. If I had had a blog back then, this is what it would have been about.

I won’t bore you with all the medical details. Who wants to hear the gory specifics about someone else’s medical condition, right? But suffice it to say, I had all the symptoms of Cushing’s Syndrome. Consistently my cortisol levels were double the normal values. That’s high, but not really that high.

I don’t know exactly how I got to that point. It may have been the birth control pills I started taking after I got married. I don’t really know. Nobody knows. But, ironically or not, as soon as I had invested my entire life into fundamentalism, it started.

Things weren’t right with my health, and my mother taught me that when things weren’t right, you need to go to the doctor for help.

When I told the (BJU-employed) doctor everything and that I had been exercising to lose the weight I had gained, she didn’t believe me. She said something like, “It’s quite obvious that that couldn’t be true.” Or something like that.

She didn’t believe me! How is that even possible? How dare she! A health-care professional who, at first blush, accuses her patient of lying!?? She, in sum, patted me on the head and sent me on my way, assuming, I’m sure, that not indulging my sinful lie would put a stop to my troubles.

This really bothered me. It still bothers me. Because I still assume that people aren’t going to believe me when I tell them what I’m doing or not doing. And I don’t live a raucous, devil-may-care life. I exercise — I have pretty consistently except for pregnancy and sickness my whole adult life. I don’t drink. I have never smoked. I take my vitamins daily. I’m a square. A total square. But when I see that white lab coat, I assume that whatever I say will be disbelieved. It’s a kind of learned helplessness for my health.

Anyway. . . . I am nothing if not stubborn. And so I set out to prove her wrong — like her opinion of me mattered somehow. I continued to power walk like mad — between 16-20 miles per week. Our lab-collie mix joined me. Back campus there. I’m sure my neighbors from that time remember seeing me in rain or shine, winter and summer.

I didn’t lose a pound. I actually gained weight. And we were so BJU-poor, that I let my shoes get too far gone. And I developed a pretty serious pain in my foot.

So back to the doctor I went. Here I had a definite, material symptom this time, right? And this doctor was supposed to be the best one, I was told. The female. The one that understood. I told her about the foot pain. And she actually told me that it couldn’t hurt that bad. That I was imagining things.

I insisted. She belittled and accused. I insisted some more. In time, I got worse; the symptoms seemed more mysterious (more Cushing’s like). I brought Grant with me. We made big enough pests of ourselves that in disgust she passed us along to a specialist although she did make it clear to him beforehand that I was a nutcase.

Thankfully, he took one look at my symptoms and blood work and did not agree with her character assessment.

But he didn’t have any answers either. Nor did his buddy up the road. Or his buddy in Indiana (we moved to Bloomington at this point). Or his buddy. Or the other endocrinologist. I got poked, prodded, infuriated, mortified, and still no answers. The pain in my foot was so intense, I’d have to crawl to the bathroom first thing in the morning. I eventually got a cane.

Because this last Indiana guy was Dr. Wait-and-See, I took the bull by the horns and got an appointment at the Mayo Clinic during my summer break in 1998. Grant had summer school and couldn’t go with me, so my mom joined me. We took the Amtrack up to Minnesota that summer. That entire experience is a blog series in and of itself. But King Hussein of Jordan was there at the same time! I didn’t bring my sedan chair though.

It was mostly a waste of time. They told me nothing new. I got poked, prodded, mortified, tested, and even photographed (!!). As before, they’d take one look at my symptoms, act all positive that they could solve everything, and continue with the testing. But when the results were neither normal nor abnormal enough, they’d shrug and pat me on the head and wish me well.

No character assassinations though. There are small blessings.

I found a NIH trial at the University of Michigan on Cushing’s Syndrome. I got in. If I remember correctly, they were testing the effects of cortisol on memory. ;) They did the same old stuff and were headed quickly toward the same conclusion.

Until. . . . a physician’s assistant listened. Really, really listened. She asked me about the pain in my foot. I described it to her like I had described it a dozen other doctors: it felt like a nail was stabbing my heel. It’s the worse in the morning and then it gets better, and then there’s a point of no return and I can hardly walk at all.

She, God bless her, said, “I think you have a heel spur.”

A HEEL SPUR? Really?? You’re kidding?!?? . . .

One $35 X-ray later and we had our proof. There it was. For five years I had had a lousy, plain-as-day, ordinary, run-of-the-mill spur. I wasn’t imagining it at all.

I was still in denial, but my darling mother dragged me, hobbling and weeping, to the orthotic store the next day. I didn’t believe this would work. How could it? I still wondered if it actually was my bad character that was causing these problems.

Within 2 days, I could walk normally. And within a few weeks I was . . . well, all the Cushing’s Symptoms started to clearly diminish. I got back home to Bloomington and visited a sports doctor (tons of them in that college town). I told him what was up and he said, “You poor thing! You have really suffered.”

That was the first doctor among all those others to empathize with me. And the first to offer me actual but really inexpensive solutions.

I used to say that what I learned from all this is that doctors are really just mechanics. You need them, of course, but they aren’t much more than technicians at some point. And Occham’s Razor, of course: the simplest answer is usually the correct one.

Now I think what happened is that the birth control pills messed with my system, so I walked like a fiend to fix it (and prove my worth), got that heel spur, and the pain from that caused my stress-hormone cortisol production to rise. That was a form of “Pseudo-Cushing’s” in the end.

In the grand scheme of things, one doctor was just as incompetent as the next. Probably they were so focused on their own endocrine specialty that they couldn’t listen to the whole problem, although you’d think the famed Mayo Clinic could sort through that. It took a PA to get to the bottom of it. And it took a sports doc to understand and actually solve the problem.

Usually specialists rely on general practitioners to catch these heel-spur sorts of problems. But my general practitioner was stuck. Stuck in a lousy ideology that made it easier to accuse an Other of sin than listen. Confronting was more her job than diagnosing. Judging was more important than thinking. The metaphysical heart was easier for her to “see” than a malformed heel bone.

I still hear her voice in my head. Or perhaps, reading Jay Adams and his ilk accentuate her long-forgotten self-righteous and ill-proven diatribe delivered to me at a time of physical pain and fear while I was wearing nothing but a paper dress. Through all this, I’ve discovered that my main motivation in fundamentalism was shame and self-loathing, and that’s a deliberate systemic thing. It’s described, defended, promoted, and assumed. It’s the first knee-jerk reaction. “No doubt the trouble is with you,” right?

This is all just another layer to a recently-realized problem. A layer that lies a little closer to my gut. Another layer that needs to be sliced away a la William of Ockham.

I’m such a dork. No, really. I am. If you haven’t figured that out already. It’s okay because my parents — as lovely and as lovable as they are — are dorks too. So I come by it honestly. And they love me.

Maybe everybody’s a dork and only a few of us admit it and embrace it. . . . Yeah, that’s the one I’m going with.

I found some more proof of my dorkitude today although, to be honest, it was Junior High and everybody’s a dork in Junior High.

I found the signatures on the inside fly-leaf of my Bible.

Now, in 1980, this was the thing to do if you were a fundamentalist child (a.k.a. dork). A famous preacher/speaker came to your church (probably also a dork) and you race up afterward (very dorkily) to get his signature in your Bible.

I loved this little Bible. It was my 12th birthday present from my parents. It was red and had a snap cover. Cambridge. KJV, of course. I didn’t have a Scofield (new or old), but my parents did. Frankly, my parents had every translation known to the English and French and Polish world, but that’s why I love them too!

So look.

Stop laughing at my dorky stickers. Stickers were soooooooo I.T. in 1980. They had whole sticker stores in the mall. And that pizza one was scratch-n-sniff!

And the second page:

First, isn’t my mother’s handwriting lovely? Dad’s is too. Steve and I must be a throw-back to some primitive inscrutable scrawl.

Notice all the women I got too! Yeah for me. My silent-but-rebel mom probably encouraged that. Or my loud-and-rebel dad. Or both. My parents are gems.

But look at the first signature I got up there at the top — Beneth Peters Jones. I remember when I got that signature. She was promoting her (then) new book Beauty and the Best at a neighboring church, and, of course, I bought a copy! I remember the sweater I was wearing. I loved that sweater. It was pink fair isle that I got at American Eagle which was really cool back then (read: dorky) and not slutty like it is now (read: cool). Also let me say that while that particular sweater is long-gone, I now know exactly how they are knitted (in the round from the top down) and where you can find the math to make your own (Elizabeth Zimmerman) and that kids in British Isles learn to knit such things as they are walking around (because they have this belt that they can shove one needle in). But I’ve never actually knitted one (DORK!).

I was elated that I got her autograph that day! Really elated. She said something very polite — and she is an extremely gracious and hospitable lady — about it being new and how she liked the snap covers and all that. Bless her. Bless her for being so much a gentlewoman to a dorky 12-year-old.

Weird. All that she and I would share in the years to come but could never predict at that precise moment of my fawning dorkitude and her polite conversation. That my husband and I would travel with her husband and her to Mexico for 10 days (we were the singing side-kicks). That she would barely pass my grad project because she was uncomfortable with the topic (feminism!). That I, like her, would have a first born who was born still. And the rest, of course. . . . All the rest.

Look at those names. If those were the celebrities in my Junior High life, is it any wonder I became who I was? Several names are my pastors. Most of the others are evangelists or just guest speakers.

I got out my High School Bible too. We wear out our Bibles quickly in fundamentalism! It was smaller and not as fine but still KJV (my college Bible was so small that I had to hold it up right next to my nose to read it and it was NASV). It does have my Wordless Book bookmarks still in it because I was a CEF missionary for two summers, and I was prepared (kinda dorky). It has no signatures. I s’pose I had figured out it was a dorky thing to do.

Except for one thing is exactly the same and in the exactly same place — across from Genesis 1. From my Junior High Bible:

and in my High School Bible:

I remember why I wrote it the first time. I was told to! And I can probably take you right back there on 11-mile and Schoenherr and show you exactly where I was sitting in the front row (DORK!). Why did I think it was so important that I transferred that alone from one Bible to the next? I really don’t remember.

I’m glad that my High School self caught my Junior High mistake of “conversation” instead of “conservation” in that First Law. Whew!

Now, I know why these where there in that place — because I was a reared a Creationist through and through. Heck — I still have my Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter upstairs, the text that is most often referenced for its fallacies. I remember Science class in 7th grade. Most of our time was spent being told how wrong Carl Sagan got it on Nova the night before. It was our assignment to watch him and to deconstruct him the next day. None of us in that class will ever forget when Andrea Cloud unwittingly said the exact. wrong. thing. in response to Miss Westray’s question: “Miss Cloud. Do you agree with Mr. Sagan when he said that the Earth is billions and billions of years old?” To which Andrea shrugged, “Well, yeah. He’s on TV. So he must be right.” Oooooooh! We all felt her pain.

But I got this in Sunday School, not in Christian Day School. And uh . . . it’s curious.

The first law of thermodynamics is actually:

Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Seriously, why did my teacher leave out the first part? She got it from her pastor/husband, I’m sure. Why drop that?

And the second law of thermodynamics has to do with entropy and is best summarized as:

It is impossible for there to exist any process whose only effect is to transfer energy from a system at a low temperature to one at a higher temperature. In other words, heat flows downhill.

Creationists reason from that that everything tends toward disorder and randomness, and, thus, evolution defies that law. I’ll let the believing scientists deconstruct the fallacies in that Creationist criticism. I don’t really much care about the Science per se.

I care more about how that idea of the inevitability of disorder affects and infects the conservative Evangelical ideology. Everything and anything — if left alone — will deconstruct into chaos. At least that’s what I was taught. Work hard — very hard — and you can resist the inevitable decay. Effort can trump entropy. And if it doesn’t, if you fail, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or right enough.

And if we get it wrong in our hoist-them-on-their-own-petard mudball we lob at Science, how could it possibly be correct in our misunderstood application of this 2nd law to the Christian life? We are so infected with this same effort-can-trump-entropy trope. We actually believe past generations’ goofs are a result of their not working hard enough or smart enough or biblical enough.

We think we’re better. But we’re just as big a dorks as we always were. Just with more and more appeals to misunderstood laws, more and more effort, more and more rigidity, more and more illusions that our way is “biblical.” So the Law of Thermodorknamics could be:

The amount of effort is directly proportional to the dorky destructiveness of that effort.

In other words, what’s your justification for this project?

Conservative Evangelicalism was a political movement with religious muscle (not a religious movement with political consequences). Of course, we can’t know for another few years or so, but it seems that when one of our (supposed) own occupied the White House and bankrupted our moral resources, the movement died.

Now there is a vacuum. Some of us have absconded for a still-ersatz Evangelical Left. Some still straddle the line as libertarians. Those who have stayed in the Religious Right continue to beat the same war drum of fear and pain. Not only is it not working, it’s hurting those that are least able to speak for themselves.

I believe that we’re at a crossroads. We’re either going to circle the wagons and continue to brandish our tomahawks at imaginary monsters while our children quietly leave us and/or the Faith (since we’ve so adeptly quilted our beliefs with our politics, rejecting the one clearly means they will have to leave the other). Or we’ll stop and try a new way. Still the Gospel way, of course, but one that isn’t stuck in the grooves we’ve worn into the prairie mud.

I don’t know what that new way looks like. I want to imagine several alternatives. But not until I understand how we got here. How I got here as a daughter of conservative Evangelicalism.

So many of my Gen-X peers have left fundamentalism. Many of the Boomers still remain (changing their name to “biblicist” or some other essentialized term) or still defend the movement from the outside. The Gen-Yers are about to leave in droves. Those of us who have left too often believe the myth that we learned in fundamentalism that the real difference between them and us is music (”worship style”) or dress or even theology, only to embrace a nearly identical ethic within neo-evangelicalism that is as fearful, as striving, as sectarian, and as contradictory.

If we really want to leave behind the excesses of fundamentalism, we have to more clearly identify what those excesses are. We can’t believe the characterization we grew up hearing. We need to look at this from a different angle, and we need to start at the beginning.

Now I don’t plan on continuing this in any orderly fashion. I have to write it out, and as an “independent scholar,” in a motley fashion. With little snips of information here. Puking up thoughts I’ve digested there. It won’t be pretty, so consider yourself warned.

I’ve gathered my texts and I’m beginning to see some themes rising to the surface. The general research areas will be:

• While the term “fundamentalist” and the movement fundamentalism has fallen into disrepute and disrepair, the rhetorical form of fundamentalism is alive and well. In other words, romantic sectarianism continues. Nothing’s changed. Oh sure, some may drink alcohol or have hip music, but the rhetoric of the Christian life is identical to the BJU expression of romantic separation.
• Essentializing terms such as “biblicist,” “biblical,” “Bible-based,” “Christ-centered,” “Gospel-centered,” “Sacred,” even “Reformed” still identify and divide and perpetuate the same drama of romantic tragedy as did the essentializing term of “fundamentalism.”
• Even while criticizing Keswick/Dispensational/Pentecostal versions of soteriology, conservative Evangelicals reserve this identical containment drama for their prescriptive discourses  for women and children. While they make fun of “decisionism” or “easy-believe-ism,” they perpetuate it in a “hard believe-ism.”
• In discourses for women, complementarianism — a theological reaction to the political threat of feminism — articulates a “second blessing” for believing women urging them to simply fulfill their “role” (a relatively recent and hardening term) as women. The exact same theologians that have rejected Keswick theology for themselves endorse it for their women. The complementarian Danvers Statement has risen to the level of a Confession.
• In discourses for parenting, punitive parenting — another theological reaction to some political threat but I’m not sure what exactly yet — has elevated spanking to a “conduit” or “means of grace” for children raised in the Faith. In other words, spanking has become not simply one tool among many, but a biblical command or, worse yet, a sacrament.
• I plan on researching the last 50 years of marriage and parenting advice in conservative Evangelicalism. On the face of it, it seems everything changed in 1970 when James Dobson published Dare to Discipline and Jay Adams published Competent to Counsel. The former was a psychologist talking in theological terms, and the latter was a rhetorician (!!) talking against psychological terms. Both were clear separatists — each shunning worldliness and pagan ways. Dobson is a Nazarene and Adams a Presbyterian (ARP), so a theological contrast appears more stark than it really is. Dobson gets so much attention due to his political aspirations, and Adams gets virtually no attention outside of a particular sliver of conservative Reformed Protestantism. But when it all comes out in the wash, they are virtually identical in their expressions (and their “descendants’ expressions) of Christian living.

I welcome any observations, contributions, criticisms, hunches, or disagreements. Save your ad hominem attacks for your own blog, forum, or dinner table, however. I’ve heard it all before anyway. It’s all old news.

Snow days are great. You get to spend the whole day with your favorite sweetie and your brood! The outdoors are so bright that you need to shade your eyes from the glare. All the winter greyness is covered with a beautiful sparkling and pristine blanket straight from Heaven. It’s the meterological version of Grace.

When I found myself a newly minted stay-at-home-mom, I didn’t really feel any different than I did as a work-outside-the-home-mom. I had been completely oblivious to the political Mommy Wars that had been going on for a decade. When other stay-at-home-moms heard about my perceived “career change,” I was startled by their gushing as if now I had fulfilled my true and perfect destiny as a woman.

Huh? . . . I was fulfilled before. I’ll be fulfilled here too.

Getting my sea legs in my new occupation hasn’t changed this perpetual what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about expression on my face. I read the mommy books, and I end up throwing them across the room. The persistent theme is that if you’re truly a saved woman, you’ll stay at home. Wait a second! I thought I heard growing up that if I was really a committed Christian, I’d go to the mission field in the jungles of Africa. Have we changed the terms of the Second Blessing all of sudden? How come I didn’t get the memo?

Yes, I’m a stay-at-home mommy. Yes, I’m content as a stay-at-home mommy. This wasn’t my “choice” per se. But I’m not clammoring to get a job either. I like it. But I liked it before when I worked outside the home. That was bliss. I nursed my boys to sleep every afternoon. I ate lunch with them everyday. . . . Am I terrifically content? Or is the way we talk about womanhood and the Christian family just pretty lousy?

I was venting about this with my better-half several weeks ago. He said, “No, no. For you, this stay-at-home-mom thing is like a snow day. You wake up and realize that you get to stay at home! It’s a gift!!”

And sure that carries with it a different wardrobe, a different routine, a different set of expectations. It’s new. But it’s good. But before was good too.

It’s all good.

How to be a Gadfly:

• Pick a cause that you’re passionate about, and ride that horse for all you’re worth.
• Start small. Your cause may be an item of earth-shaking significance or something utterly obscure, but you’re more likely to get attention, and risk serious consequences, if your views push people’s buttons. So be content with small victories in the beginning and work up from there.
• Share your views. Write letters to the editors of newspapers and to your elected officials. Create a Web site, or visit one of the existing ‘gadfly’ sites to talk with like-minded persons.
• Be prepared to swim against the current.
• Take heart from all the gadflies who have gone before. Know that you’re part of a proud tradition.