Thoughts on The Mic Mac Song
(this week we listened to a piece of music. When it was over, we had to write a piece expressing the way the music had made us feel.)
The exuberant tone of the song is evident – perhaps the community is celebrating its braves home triumphant from the hunt with enough capture to survive the long winter.
Tribes speak the same language, sing the same song with others who know and understand, with all the richness of historical context.
My tribe is scattered worldwide, as are many peoples’ nowadays, and it becomes more of an effort as time passes to keep the connections going. It´s like the ageing process when the body decides it’s done this one long enough or the synapses get worn down. My mother commented that in her day there was never any of the modern searching for genetic inheritance or investigating the source of one’s traits – a bit like the famous sites around you that you never get around to visiting because they are right there: if your tribe is all around you, there is no need to encapsulate the obvious. It is when you feel the danger of being assimilated that you hang on to your distinctiveness. I recognise that my need for knowing where certain traits in my generations come from stems from my alarm bells that want to stamp out any tendencies towards wanderlust, irresponsibility, defying the established status quo, disrespect for differences and all the other non-social skills that lead to anarchy and that come from being orphaned from your tribe too young. I was once told that a Jesuit education bred leaders as opposed to the British public school model which churned out establishment clones. This battle between individualism/borderline Narcissism and social justice and equality for all is the age-old one. I see it in my children, I see it in the thunderclouds of paradigm-shift - in the Middle East, in the social media revolutions… When you lose your tribe, your identity has no anchor until you can replace the one with another.
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