For this final blog post for my Cultural Anthropology class I will be combining the previous post that I had not been able to post due to family commitments and the Blog posts that will comprise my final. My research subject is a PNW transplant who I’ve known since my time in the Army came to an end two years ago. For the purposes of this blog I’ve given them the nickname of “Brian”. Brian is a mid-30’s average looking white male, married with three children, two boys and one girl. Being a PNW transplant, Brian hails from different areas of the United States since he himself is many refer to as a “military brat”, with both of his parents having served in the Army themselves. Moving around the country as a child made making friends when he was younger harder for him, but that didn’t deter him from trying to be as normal as everyone else. Brian’s parents raised him with the belief “that everyone should be treated the way you want to be treated”, the Golden Rule if you will. Before joining the military, Brian’s parents had retired to NE Florida when he was in the ninth grade, seeing as that is where both of them were from. Brian along with his sister, “Josie” had a hard time fitting in at their new school since they had just moved there, but since they had been used to moving around and changing schools during their parent’s service. Now it was at this time that Brian would be faced with a situation that would change his views of his formative years, he made his schools’ soccer team. How would this event change Brian I thought to myself. How could something as simple as joining a team influence someones life as much as it did Brian’s? As I had mentioned earlier Brian’s parents had raised him to treat others the way he wanted to be treated, and lend help to those that needed it. But his joining his schools’ soccer team changed that, at least for the foreseeable future. Growing up as a military brat, Brian was somewhat of a loner, due to having moved around a lot, the friends he did make were pretty temporary whether due to his family moving or their family moving. As a new member of the team he did his best to try and fit in with his fellow players but he never truly felt like he fit in, as Brian puts it he “faked” a lot of his interactions with his fellow players so that they would like him. This included the typical high school locker room talk, whether it be jokes or name-calling, Brian joined in.
As Brian continued through high school, he became less of a loner and became more popular due to his association with the other players on the team, some who were from families that were more “fortunate” than others. From his interactions with these players and his growing popularity he was introduced to the local student Republican club, which he became a member of during his senior year in high school. Even though the idea of politics was not foreign to him, his parents never reinforced a particular party in their household, they reinforced the ideas that every person has the right to be themselves and that they should be responsible for their actions among others. As a newly minted member of this group he found something that would influence his outlook for the formative years of his young adult life.
After graduating high school, Brian was faced with several choices, continue on to college, go into the military like his parents did, or enter the workforce early, to at least get some experience. Brian chose the latter, which as he states, “was probably the worst decision he made, but he wouldn’t change what he chose”. This particular statement puzzled me, why wouldn’t he change the so called worst decision he ever made? What about this choice of getting a job right out of high school was the worst choice he made? I needed to know what outlook he had on life to make him come to this statement. As we parted ways for the day, I spent a lot of time thinking of that statement and started to look at some of the choices I had made throughout my life and it troubled me.
Brian’s military career and mine share many similarities, even though we come from different backgrounds, and didn’t really agree on many things, our friendship had been pretty solid because we had been through some difficult situations together, whether in training or going downrange, we never let our personal beliefs influence our friendship. When we met up the next day, I asked him why he thought working right out of high school was the worst decision he made, and why he wouldn’t change his choice? If he did, he would probably have not met his wife, or myself(which to me was more important if only jokingly). His answer was surprising to me, and hadn’t been what I thought it would be. After high school he worked several part time jobs, nothing that really made a difference to anyone, even though he learned a lot from the people he worked with, whether it was different perspectives of the world, what kind of person he didn’t want to be, the kind of woman he was attracted to, or the kind of people he valued. All of these things he said he “would give up in a heartbeat because all it was to him was a waste of time”. Through his time in the Army he told me, he had met the same type of people he had spent his time working with before joining, so all of that stuff he learned before hand, he could joined sooner and probably have been close to retiring at a higher rank than what he was had he joined sooner. I understood what he meant here because I had had those same thoughts, and I think everyone at one point or another has them as well. But this still didn’t answer his second statement. As he pulled a long sip of his drink he noticed that I was still puzzled, and I asked him to explain why he wouldn’t have chosen to do differently if he was afforded the opportunity to do it again. His answer made me realize I had been thinking about it all wrong and I never put it together. He told me that even though he said the decision to not go to college or into the military right after high school was the worst decision of his life, and that his reasoning about it on the military side was that he could have been at a higher rank and closer to retirement, he wouldn’t change his decision because not only of the ripple effect of changing his entire life, meaning he wouldn’t have met his wife, he wouldn’t have had his three beautiful children. He wouldn’t have changed anything because his going to work part time jobs right after high school allowed him to get the bad decisions out of his system. It allowed him to get all of that “young and dumb” stuff out of the way, and allowed him to really see what he wanted for his life.
In closing, doing this blog was difficult, for me at least. I have a hard time staying focused and writing my personal thoughts for anyone to just read. I felt more vulnerable than I expected and wanted to. However, I did my best to overcome this as I have anxiety when it comes to things that I write, I feel I never write as good as I could. Nonetheless, I tried to follow as closely as I could to the style of Hochschild’s writing and her ability of telling someone else’s story.
Another struggle I faced while doing this assignment was setting up times for me and my research subject to get together to conduct my research as he is still Active Duty and his unit was getting ready to head to the National Training Center in California and being a Platoon Sergeant, his time was taken up mostly with getting his platoon ready and spending his time with his family before he would be gone for a month.
Even though timing was not the best, I felt that participating not only in this class but this assignment helped me learn to just sit and listen to someone tell their story without judging what they say. That was the most interesting thing to me as it allowed me freedom to just be a witness to someone tell their story, regardless of who I was. It helped me learn to listen more for the sake of learning more so than just to respond. I never really put much though into Anthropology before I took this class, but at the end of this quarter I feel that I have a newfound respect for the work that they do. I don’t feel that my “Empathy Walls” have changed because I’ve tried to be as empathetic as I could for most of my life, but I can always improve.
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