I finished Educated by Tara Westover.
And then I thought about it for days.
Actually before I even finished it I would sometimes shut it and just ponder some stuff. It had me thinking about how HUMAN we are. About our differences and our similarities. About the divide between us and how its really just a hologram.
Tara Westover does a good job of not bashing Mormonism or getting too political. I bet she isn’t anywhere close to the politics of her parents. And I think she realizes that not all Mormons are like her parents.
I met two Mormon girls during my summer at the food pantry. It was really difficult to get them to talk after they said they missed the mountains and that Dallas was hot.
But my point is about differences that end up being similarities.
I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. A very liberal, progressive, hippie area. Always has been, probably always will be. Out in Idaho, Tara Westover knew anti-pharmaceutical people as ultra-rightwing. I knew them as ultra-leftwing. The first time I saw someone talking against vaccines it was at a rally at the university where everyone was smoking weed and claiming pharmaceutical drugs were killing people and that the government didn’t care. At my Christian church growing up all I heard was pro-vaccine, pro-government stuff.
Perhaps the politics of people really have nothing to do with what they believe or see or perceive about the world? Perhaps.
Perhaps instead we carry a certain view into adulthood because of where we grew up and the people we hung around. Madison people never talked to Idaho people before the internet and yet they have a few similarities.
Looking back, the 1990s was rife with vaccine hesitant people… Jenny McCarthy, Toni Braxton, Robert De Niro…
Imagine the 90s with Twitter…Gwen Stefani, Chris Farley… Sorry, getting off track…
People’s views can and do change. And that isn’t bad. Our ideas and beliefs of the world can glide and move with the storms of society, changes in world issues, personal experience, interactions with other cultures and humans and, ultimately, with our education.
Education meaning daring to be curious. That is what education is to me. We can all go to Oxford and be told to read something, but it’s when we become curious that we become humble.
It’s pretty cool that even if we don’t have professors that push us towards our full potential, we can continue our education just by being curious. Learning about vaccines and medical drugs. Learning about history and science. Cultures and languages. The more we learn, the more we break down the walls of closed-mindedness. If only because we realize how much there is to learn. And with so much to learn, how can we possibly claim to have all the answers?
What have you read that made you think lately?
What have you learned about lately that maybe opened your curiosity up?