On Being Alternative
Posted on September 10, 2012
Being alternative is not something I chose. I am a product of my times (the Sixties). Sometimes I wish I liked fast-food restaurants, action movies, reality television, “lite” beer, church on Sunday, Red Sox baseball (okay, I love Red Sox baseball!) But growing up in the Sixties, I ended up a vegetarian, foreign-film watching, craft-beer loving ultra-liberal.
It hasn’t made my life easier, I can tell you that. Sometimes I fall victim to the sin of vanity, thinking that I am somehow better than others because my lifestyle choices are eccentric or not mainstream. But in my heart I know that’s not true. I’m not an elitist, I’m just different. I’m not more evolved, I just evolved differently, into a person who is sometimes uncomfortable at social gatherings because I feel like I don’t fit in.
But isn’t what’s happening in America these days a kind of fragmentation, where everybody is alternative in some way or another? Our demographic is no longer white, Protestant, Anglo Saxon. Less than 50% of the people in the country are Caucasian now. If you go to California, you see a truly diverse population that is a glimpse of the future of the rest of the country, with Hispanic, Asian, and other minorities now making up the majority. Fewer and fewer of us attend a traditional church. Almost everyone eats a wide variety of ethnic food from Mexican to Japanese. Cable television offers an amazingly vast array of viewing choices that cater to smaller and smaller segments of the populace. Gone are the days when three networks dominated the ratings. Now, for example, you can watch a show about people opening storage lockers, running pawn shops, or operating towing companies for a living!
These days I meet lots of supposedly blue-collar young men and women who are into all kinds of interesting, formerly “alternative” offerings. Our plumber plays chess and goes curling. I have a farmer friend who is into the writings of Rudolf Steiner on “bio-dynamics”. The young woman at the market likes the Yankees, but she also cooks Thai food and wants to start her own company and be CEO.
And here at HNE I meet people who have all kinds of diverse and interesting outside interests, everything from hand-bell ringing to making handcrafted jewelry to running in crazy “Tough Mudder” obstacle course races.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think it’s great. Diversity means choice. Choice means stimulating variety. So here’s my question—what’s alternative about you? And, in the words of Sixties icon Bob Dylan, “How does it feel, to be on your own”?