Rockin’ Me Mamma Like a Southbound Train is Good, Actually

Should freedom from scolds be enshrined in the Constitution?

Something To Read has been quiet for a few weeks because I have been traveling—for work to Tucson, then to Chicago for a conference, and then for fun to Nashville, Gatlinburg, Knoxville, Asheville, and Raleigh. Whew! My head was very happy to rest on my just-plump-enough pillow at home. (Aside: Why can’t hotels mix and match pillow height? This is not hard, people! Some pillows should be high and some flat, so you can find one that’s the height you like it. If any hotels want to hire me as a pillow consultant, I am available.)

Listening to and watching fantastic musicians in Nashville was the most fun, but the enjoyment, though profound, did not explain a pervasive feeling of calm and relaxation (other than being away from work and deadlines, of course) that I finally traced to an intangible mental sigh of relief at being free from scolds. I am beginning to think this freedom should be added to the ‘inalienable rights’ protected in the US Constitution.

For the first couple of days, I thought my inner peace might stem from the (relative) freedom from people on sidewalks who are out of their minds on drugs, which was absolutely a very pleasant hiatus. I have compassion for people in this condition and I can imagine few worse states of being, but also I do not wish to be part of their journeys either as an unwitting bystander or something worse. But by the time I got to Asheville, NC, a pretty mountain town with many people who are on drugs and living on the streets (not Portland-level numbers, but quite a few) I realized their absence was not the source of my inner calm.

The easiest way to explain my dawning awareness of the sensation I am calling the (completely bearable) lightness of freedom from scolds is to give a few examples. Part way through an evening at a Sunday night jam session at a famous honky tonk blue grass venue called The Station Inn, the old guy who was loosely running things asked all the veterans in the audience to stand up so they could receive a round of applause. My first reaction was to blanch a little internally, thinking someone would yell something rude or disparaging or pointedly not clap, but nothing like this happened. Instead, everyone just… clapped appreciatively for a few seconds. In front of me, a frowny woman in a cowboy hat who was with several women friends but for some reason had not seemed to be enjoying herself up until then, stood up and even smiled and fist bumped the man next to her after they confirmed that they had both been in the Airforce. My reflexive assumption that someone in the crowd would consider it their obligation to disparage the act of thanking US military veterans had proven unfounded.

Later in the evening, a round-faced prepubescent boy, maybe twelve years old, with a shy smile who played a mean guitar and had traveled from Fort Worth, TN, to jam with these musicians, asked everyone to sing along with his rendition of Wagon Wheel (check out this fantastic version by Darius Rucker of the song originally written by Bob Dylan and Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show). When the entire crowd belted out everytime the chorus rolled around, “rock me mamma like a southbound train, rock me mamma like the wind and the rain” I kept thinking ‘if we were in Portland, someone would object on the grounds that some people only have access to a northbound train’. I am exaggerating, of course, but not that much. Consider that one of the main justifications for keeping schools remote in Portland for 18 months during the pandemic was that some families might not want to go back, therefore no one should be allowed to go back because this contrast would widen disparities. It’s nearly impossible to grasp the logic of this rationale because it is so stupid and so obviously itself a disparity-widening policy.

Living in the Pacific Northwest, you learn to steel yourself when opportunities for creating division arise because someone almost always takes them. At a recent schoolboard meeting in Portland, hecklers, or activists as they call themselves, showed up to protest and shout down the board’s discussion and vote on termination of a teacher who had flagrantly violated the terms of his contract, who happened to be black. Sadly, these intimidation tactics work because the board, in a particularly pathetic show of cowardice, voted to overturn the superintendent’s firing of this teacher. Not only do these tactics work on decision makers, they instill in the rest of us a constant awareness of the ever-present possibility of being scolded for wrong think. Taking a break from that vigilance was deeply relaxing.

One of the actions I took in January 2023 to gain more freedom from scolds was to leave my job in academia, a major epicenter of this behavior. I still believe the majority of academics are delightful people and I work with them frictionlessly every day, but now from my perch outside an academic institution. I no longer have to sit through faculty meetings where hours—yes, literally hours—are spent upbraiding someone about the wording of an email—what these same activists refer to as “calling someone in”. Add to that the hours spent reading emails responding to the original bad email and then reading responses to the responses (apparently no one on the faculty sees not weighing in as an option), and the cumulative time wastage quickly reaches the hundreds of hours. I did not want to spend so much of my time on these activities and I was tired of the concomitant thought that often bubbled up that it was only a matter of time before the one being ‘called in’ i.e., publicly scolded, would be me.

There were warning signs: I was told in faculty meetings that advocating for school reopening was racist but I did it anyway, for a full year. There was discussion of requiring us to put pronouns in our email signatures; I did not put pronouns in my email signature. I taught at a state school, so this type of compelled speech would be blatantly unconstitutional, which I pointed out to a high-level administrator and the topic did not come up again. But something else would, was my daily worry.

Whether the Pacific Northwest, perhaps the most naturally beautiful and bountiful region of our country, can find its way back to a less tut-tutting version of itself remains to be seen. There are so many elements about living here I love and do not want to give up. But the sigh of relief my brain heaved at being away from the threat of imminent scolding was real. It is ironic that the expression “it’s all good” is popular in Portland, because the reality is that practically nothing is good enough for the most vocal activists here. A lawsuit brought by people in wheelchairs or with other serious physical disabilities against the City of Portland to clear tents off sidewalks so they, too, can use said sidewalks? It was opposed by Disability Rights Oregon, an organization founded to advocate for people with disabilities. The Oregonian reported that “Disability Rights Oregon executive director Jake Cornett said in a statement that the litigation wrongly pitted “some people with disabilities against other people with disabilities.” See what I mean?

I am now in the ‘watchful waiting’ period, which is what the medical field calls it when you have a health issue that may or may not turn out to require intervention, and the immediate path forward is to just keep an eye on it. I am taking it as a hopeful sign that last year, Portland’s “professional cuddler” closed up shop. She started in 2014, which seems about right. Maybe people are deciding they don’t need a professional cuddler and that accepting a non-rules based invitation to ‘rock me mamma like a wagon wheel, rock me mamma any way you feel’ is okay—enjoyable even. That would bode well for the quality of life here.