{thanksful: 16 – channel 9 people}

In a rather wince-worthy conversation this week in my writing group, one of my writing partners self-identified as a heathen before asking a question about the imaginary religions in my science fiction novel. (Said religions are variants on religions with which we’re familiar here on Planet Earth.) Later, I mentioned “the heathen in the room,” before asking that person to specify something. In reply, every single person in my writing group prefaced their responses with, “well, as a heathen,” or “well, I’m not entirely a heathen, but…” when I was only talking to one of them – the self-identified heathen. And, chagrined, I realized it maybe wasn’t a joke I – as the singular church-attending person in the group – could make.

Heathen is a stupid word; it’s an old English word, rife with schismatic, Eurocentric meaning which brays, “I survey your country and you’re not me, you’re too dark and foreign and possibly lightly clothed, thus I am saved by my very white god, and you are not.” It’s a word which was applied to Muslims and Jews and anyone not Anglican well before the Crusades; the OED has first usage as 970. It’s been a pejorative for centuries. Eons. Ugh.

My sister and I, when we were little, called them by another name: The Channel 9 People. Channel 9 was the PBS affiliate station where all the parental-approved TV shows lived. It was the channel our long-haired, pot-smoking, hippie neighbors watched, and it was difficult to think that people who watched This Old House and News Hour were the bad people we’d been taught to see, in the world outside of our church. People who watched Nature, and The American Experience, and stayed up late to groove to Austin City Limits like our neighbors were …the nice people, who wouldn’t support the government turning against us – as we’d also been taught would happen. People like our neighbors were our secret weapons. The good guys, the Channel 9 People, in a morally ambiguous world.

There is a level of hubris and arrogance in assuming we could tell who would be Bad and who would be Good; who Lost, who Saved. I think of what damage has been done in the name of who’s in, and who’s out, in the name of grouping people so that Ours and Yours are clearly seen, and especially after this election, when “good” has meant so many varied things to varied groups of people, it is troubling. As we are all drawn in shades of gray, and there is no one righteous, no, not one, it makes me both smile and wince that my sister and I even came up with the Channel 9 People. I regret that I was brought up with such a polarized view of the world, but I’m grateful for my old neighbors, whom we loved so well, we bent the rules of our world … and for my friends who were raised heathen – without church at all – and who look at the world from another angle, to show me something new.