Hats, hate, Selma, and laughter

Two things today - the title of my blog, and reactions to watching Selma last night.

So, I need to change the blog title. Way back when I started this thing, it seemed super clever to make up a word that summed up what the blog might be. Since I didn't know whether kid posts, D&D posts, rants, creative writing, or anything else would dominate the blog, I wanted to reflect the potential for variety. I riffed on the idea of wearing many hats and came up with poly-hat-ism, the state of filling many roles/wearing many hats. I congratulated myself on a catchy creative effort and didn't think about it  ... until I started using it for political thoughts and sharing them, and more people stopped by. I know that at least two people, because they specifically asked me about it, read my title as poly-hate-ism, and why would I call it that? Why focus on the hate and the hating?

I guess this is the danger of generating your own words. Since I have fun with words, maybe I could call it logophilia instead. No way anyone will think I have a fetish for logs, right?

If you have a suggestion, I'm all ears. Comments make me happy.

Cue awkward segue where 'if my blog were actually about hate' meets Selma, a movie about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and the march he organized toward the goal of ending racist voter suppression in the 60s. Consider it segued.

My family was sitting down to have dinner last night and Audrey suggested we do a movie night and watch Selma as a way to learn more about MLK's life and work. So my father hat is on, and I am hyper-aware of every ugly thing said, every expletive, all the violence. The movie didn't pull any punches about how ugly the environment was around race in Alabama in the 60s, and I was keenly aware of all of it. Ethan has a habit of calling out people on TV when they say a bad word, and while he eventually gave up, there was a steady stream of "that's a bad word!" and "He shouldn't say that" and even "that man is smoking - that's not healthy!" going through a lot of the movie. I kept wondering if having him watch this with us at 8 years old was a horrible idea. However, teaching my kids to value social justice and equality is very important to me, and I think spending MLK day watching something that shows them some history of the civil rights movement is worth being uncomfortable over. Cain and Rae, definitely old enough to understand the movie in much more depth, were pretty quiet afterwards, and we talked a little about where we are as a country now, what progress has been made, some ways that we are still struggling. We talked about concern about the empowerment of racist ideologies in the wake of a Trump presidency. We actually stopped the movie at one point to talk about rep. John Lewis (who is portrayed in the film) and why he is in the news right now, and not attending Trump's inauguration.

The conversation with Ethan was different, very brief, and impressed me so much.
I put him to bed and just asked "What did you think about that movie?"

"He didn't laugh enough. I think Martin was a person that laughed more." (Ethan had decided earlier in the evening he was on a first-name basis)

I don't remember exactly what I said - I think I tried to explain how when people make a movie they try to set a tone and tell a specific story and can't show all the moments that aren't related but might be happier, and that I bet Martin did laugh more that that. And internally, I was thinking about the power of joy and positivity and hoping that MLK and his friends laughed a LOT.