Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 1, 1995 TAG: 9505040016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On the other hand, back in Botetourt County, birthplace of me, my parents and most of my grandparents and great-grandparents, I'm an old-timer. I haven't lived there for 25 years; I may never live there again. Still I am, and always will be, an old-timer there.
The Newcomers vs. the Old-Timers.
I know you've heard this somewhere recently. Maybe at your town council meeting or in the church parking lot; at the school board meeting, the feed-and-grain store, the post office or Hardee's.
Somewhere recently, you've been standing around eavesdropping - or maybe talking - and the subject has been ``all those new folks coming in.''
Or, ``those old fogies who haven't had an original thought in 50 years.''
Nearly everyone you know has moved at least once in his or her life. And still, we talk this way. Newcomers vs. Old-timers. Insiders vs. Outsiders. Us vs. Them. Even when we aren't quite sure who's who.
In several essays in her book "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography," Kathleen Norris addresses this mystery of what she calls ``magic boundaries'' - those boundaries we draw around ourselves which we resent ``newcomers'' crossing. Where do these protective boundaries lie? At the edges of ``family? Town? The state line?''
Norris suggests that they lie in the geography of our knowledge. Or, our lack thereof.
``Old-timers'' she deems those who refuse to learn; who indulge ``in a willful ignorance of their own regional history''; who ``stop connecting to the world outside, except through the distorting lens of television''; who tend not ``to see the truth as something that could set them free,'' but to whom truth itself has ``become an outside authority, like the economic and political forces they profess independence from, or the state and federal laws they so casually break ... ''
To these ``old-timers,'' newcomers (or ``outsiders,'' as Norris calls them) ``pose a threat ... especially if they keep on trying to share what they know.'' And especially if what they know is specialized, ``big city'' or - heavens forfend! - progressive knowledge.
This is not a new state of affairs. In George Eliot's novel "Middlemarch," published in 1872, when Dr. Tertius Lydgate comes to town, a couple of town ``old-timers'' speculate thus: ``He has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that sort of thing,'' says Mr. Brooke. To which Mr. Standish replies, ``Hang it, do you think that is quite sound - upsetting the old treatment, which has made Englishmen what they are?''
Lydgate, poor fellow, imagines that in a town like Middlemarch, where the needs are great, he can begin ``some particular reforms'' and ``innovate in his treatments.'' By the end of the book, however, this outside authority, this nascent reformer, this generous young doctor of promise has been banished in disgrace.
``More than ever,'' Norris writes, ``I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.''
If one has developed a world view in which ``everything from the outside world is suspect, while everything local, especially that which derives from the immediate family, is good,'' then racist supremacy theories make a weird and dangerous kind of sense.
Is Timothy McVeigh a newcomer or an old-timer? What would he call himself?
And what of the members of the Michigan Militia and other groups of its ilk? Are they newcomers? Old-timers? Insiders? Outsiders?
They are us. And if we fall into labeling them with division in mind, we fall into their perfidy. We collude in their ignorance.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB