#3 It Takes All Kinds

It Takes All Kinds

A Scottish pal had a saying for it. When handed evidence of yet more human folly in our world, she’d like as not shake her head and declare, “Ay, there’s nane sae queer as folk.” She comes to mind as I struggle to deal with this fresh outrage.

Scanning a favourite on-line news source just now, my eye was caught by the word Facebook. Why? Because not so long ago I’d been persuaded to join it. We’d just had a big family reunion, wanted to keep up the newly re-established contacts, share photos and news, the usual reasons, I imagine. Facebook’s trendy reputation, recent appearance in the Doonesbury comic strip and its association with youth, didn’t hurt. Once I’d mastered, with some help from my son, a few of the technicalities, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the experience, accreting a network of far-flung folk as Facebook friends. (Apologies to the poets among you for that irresistible alliteration).

Then, reading the link (http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/091307WA.shtml click on ‘Go to original’) I find that the Facebook people - these youthful, trail-blazing, inventive, clever people - have decided, in their wisdom, to ban their millions of clients from posting each other photos of themselves nursing their new babies. Already there is a growing cry of protest from young mothers in Australia, I gather. Power to them.

Disillusion, particularly when it comes along with a sense of outrage, is a stirring sensation. How in the world can this happen? What could be the possible objection? Does there in the whole world exist an image more innocently tender and hopeful and wholesome than that of a young mother breast-feeding her new child? I tell myself that there must be something I’m not understanding. There must be something behind this.

Meantime, I sent my daughter the above link, and she emailed back of hearing on a local phone-in program a male caller saying, “I wouldn’t spit in public, so I don’t see why they should breast feed… it’s disgusting.”

She also relates a personal experience of “…a news broadcaster at Sky TV, who got embarrassed at having been chatting to me without realising I was breast feeding… called my agent to lodge an official complaint!! I wasn’t to breast feed in the green room, because ‘not everybody was an arty liberal actor type’… the green room I might add had been empty, and he stuck his head round the door to talk to me, and I was so discreet he’d been standing there for 5 minutes before he noticed…” my own tiny grand-daughter being fed.

Can these experiences of young mothers be no more than another part of that mysterious reality to which men are never privy? I do notice a pronounced absence of young women on the posted list of directors at Facebook. I also notice that there is no address given as a way of sending any of them a message. They’ve cut themselves off from females and the outside world. The site’s being managed from the US leads me to wonder about money. Maybe these young guys are being squeezed by evil reactionaries clutching purse strings. On the other hand, the Facebook HQ is in Palo Alto, California. Can there be a trail of diseased thinking leading back to some local organized religious group?

Whatever the problem is at Facebook, breast-feeding wants to be encouraged, not deplored. I urge all Facebook members and their friends to let their organization know this in no uncertain terms. Such behaviour cannot be tolerated.