Got Choice?

[madrobins]

I am one lucky girl. Whenever I feel like my life is a mess I can drop back and consider my choices, and boy, do I have a lot. Some of them are not optimal choices (when I joke about filing off my serial number and running away to join the circus, the real-world equivalent would probably be moving to another city and living marginally while temping and wrestling with guilt over having abandoned my family). But I have education and energy and (except for the running away idea) support from my family and friends, and I have choices. I was thinking about this when I was talking about Brokeback Mountain last week with someone who kept saying "but why don't they just move?" Because culturally, educationally, and experientially, Ennis and Jack don't understand that they have choices, and that lack of understanding limits their choices severely.

I was thinking about this because Jon Carroll raises the issue of choice in talking about the Sago Mines disaster. A TV news correspondent, trying to fill some air, turned to a miner and asked (one hopes not perkily) "Why did you decide to become a miner?"

But the nature of the dopey question is interesting. "Why did I become a coal miner? Well, I was all set to become a veterinarian with a minor in classical literature, but there's something about the mines -- the constant danger, the lung damage, the unpredictable explosions, the claustrophobia -- that really spoke to me. I think I'm making a statement here."

It's a question that comes from the world of "having a choice." It's one of the big dividing lines in American society, the chasm between those who think they have a choice and those who think they don't. (It is my experience that a lot of human growth comes when people realize that they have choices they didn't know they had.) As far as I can tell, all the men who were killed in the Sago Mine disaster came from coal mining families. Many of them had lived in West Virginia all their lives.

Yes, any one of those men in the mines could have done something else, but might not have known it.

Stories about people who escape the weight of their community's expectations can be great. Movies like Working Girl and October Sky (which is about a kid who "escaped" the mines and became an aerospace engineer) come to mind. And every SF/fantasy story about a kid who wants to go to the stars, or to train dragons, or to leave the confines of the shire and Have an Adventure, finds an audience (some of whom won't challenge the conditions of their own lives, but want to read about someone else doing it). The opposite side of the coin is a story like It's a Wonderful Life, in which George Bailey keeps trying to escape expectations and gets roped back in over and over until he breaks; if it weren't for the fantasy ending, it would be as depressing a story as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But out here in the real world with no angels to come in and show you your life has meaning, and no Harrison Ford or Laura Dern to encourage your dreams, an awful lot of people live hard lives because they don't know the choices they have. Asking why they don't live differently is a little bit like asking why the hungry poor of France couldn't just eat cake.