Tradition!

TRADITION! It’s the Fiddler on the Roof song. TRADITION! It’s my grandfather showing up at 6AM on Sunday morning to explain to me that a really smart girl would be working on finding a man who was rich enough to keep her at home so she would not need to work at all. TRADITION! It’s my parents telling me that if medical school did not work out I could come back home to suburban Boston and quietly become a French teacher. I don’t much care for tradition, mainly because I perceive it as the opposite of change.  I am in favor of empowering individuals, opening up the fan of possibilities, removing things that make people feel poorly. I guess the father and daughter dance is a great American tradition.  Me, I tried to dance with my father once at a Bar Mitzvah reception when I was young.  He was quite inept, spun me around in a circle and actually stepped on my little foot.  I can only wonder if that hasn’t anything to do with why my feet are problematic.  It matters little; I would never have sued dear old dad.  Great American tradition?  I think not.

Okay, sometimes families are kind of screwed up.  I know when my Father-of-Blessed-Memory could not get a date, he went out with my Aunt-of-Blessed-Memory.  I have heard old family stories about how blood relatives were substituted when dates were unavailable that are so perverted they are reminiscent of King Oedipus killing dear old dad and marrying dear old mom — the obvious granddaddy of all perverted family situations.

So I need to respect a girl who has no visible father available to accompany her to a father and daughter dance, and whose mom gets an ACLU lawyer to take it to the limit.  This is a stupid tradition with an implication of incest that we might as well just let by.  Go away.

When something is a tradition, it causes enough emotion to become a hot button issue.  As such, it takes both attention and resources away from important issues, like people dying in war abroad or the war-like state within our inner cities. I will not even comment on mother and son baseball games.  There have been too many sports injuries; football and baseball should be played by robots.  I have actually been through Cranston, RI and I do not think their culture so primitive.

If daddies want to get together in one of Cranston’s larger living rooms, they can do whatever amuses them, as long as no minors are treated inappropriately.  As far as school events are concerned, there ideas out there on how to be more inclusive and less, well, traditional.