Eid mubarak

Eid mubarak to those of you celebrating the holiday today and belated Eid greetings to those who like us celebrated yesterday.

We’re on the road visiting friends and family for the next week. For this–our daughter’s second–Eid al-Adha , we stayed with some of my wife’s relatives, which was really a blessing. I’m particularly grateful for the fact of  little Raihana finally spending it properly, with family and other children.

A huge improvement over last year, alhamdulillah. It’s so important to keep in touch with and regularly reconnect with friends and family.

Not always my strong suit, alas. A rather pronounced independent streak runs in my family. To explain this, I sometimes horrify more ethnically conventional Muslims with an example from my own family history.  My grandfather was so independent that he chose to spend his final 5 years of life in the desert along the Mexican border while is family was mostly in New England. Just him, his dog, the rattlesnakes, and his shotgun. I think he wanted his privacy as his health gave out.

That’s an extreme case, of course, but at the risk of stereotyping, but I think such chilling excesses are much rarer (if not all but inconceivable) in most other American ethnic communities.

Being an icy northman, I understand the advantages of self-reliance, but I often think many WASPs–technically, I’m a WASM, but for these purposes the category works–have much to (re-)learn about family life. We’ve sacrificed too much of what is to be really human on on the altar of individualism, freedom and mobility in the pursuit of the American Dream. We need less of the "rationality" that Max Weber considered the hallmark of modernity, and more of the inefficiency, sentimentality and stubborn commitment to la Dolche Vita that supposedly hold back less economically "dynamic" non-Western societies.

My New Year’s resolution: To be less "white" in this department. This atomistic nuclear family thing is for the birds.