family...

I spent the last week in Pennsylvania, visiting family.
I don't like the way that sounds. The language, that is. I don't much care for labeling people, especially in a "family" sense. Affection and loyalty should be earned, not owed. "Blood is thicker than water" is just shabby tribalism, a way of ensuring that the resources we hoard are transferred to someone who looks like us and will care about the things we cared about (or is at least moderately unlikely to piss on our grave). The darwinian perpetuation of our genes? Please. We've all got genes, and they're happily getting more mixed up worldwide with every passing day. Besides, to a marmoset, Madonna is already indistinguishable from Malcolm X. My child? Your child? Hers? His? Don't be a simpleton. They're all ours.
Our culture's attitude toward family, like our attitude toward sex ("more than friends"), relegates friendship to second-class status. This is irksome. In the unlikely event that you ever experience genuine friendship, you'll never allow it to be denigrated again.
So i was visiting family...or people i care about with whom i share much history, if you will.
There were two particularly resonant moments.
The first was a ceremonial dedication of a bridge named in honor of my uncle Gary, a state trooper brutally murdered during an undercover drug operation. He was driven to the woods by somebody's child named Barney Russell. Barney shot Gary numerous times, with both their guns. Barney went to jail, killed an inmate, escaped, was re-captured, then was killed by an inmate. Gary died when i was two, so i never got to know this man who was perhaps the most gentle and introspective of my grandmother's sons. It was wonderful to reunite with my cousin Nikki, whom i'd not seen for decades. She was less than a year old when Gary died. I try to make sense of his death, and come up with nothing. The criminalization of drugs is a murky embarrassment. How do an action which has no victim become a crime? Who was Gary protecting us from when he died?
He was protecting us from ourselves.
Can you think of anything more senseless or futile? A TV segment on the dedication:
http://pahomepage.com/fulltext/?nxd_id=242352. Yes, it's curious that it took forty years for this kind of recognition. I heard someone say it had something to do with a politician trying to score re-election points. The "bridge" is actually a simple highway overpass. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The second resonant moment was sharing a lunch with my cousin. I'd not been able to do so for several years, as she's been in prison. It was a happy reunion, she was my favorite cousin growing up (and i'm pretty choosy about such things). Our family has been prepared for the idea that she will always be sociopathically unable to make the connection between action and consequence. Chemically-imbalanced. Sick.
The human race has barely scratched the surface of understanding mental illness. I'm guessing that one day we'll understand that the difference between the "sick" and the healthy is a line so fine as to be negligible. We're all of us irretrievably damaged by this horrifically fearful, barbaric, sexually-repressed, non-tactile world we've been born into. Most are able to adjust without becoming psychopaths or sociopaths. We survive because we must.
Or we don't.
Or we're killed.
I love you all very much.