Not Hearing the Hum.

For some reason my mind keeps settling on the word ‘properly’ and how readily people use it without giving due consideration to its subjective nature. I keep being reminded of the woman at the village hall in the summer who was most indignant that an unmarried mother should have been given priority in a housing queue instead of the young man who was ‘trying to do things properly.’ It’s a prime example of how unquestioningly people absorb and reflect what the intelligent gorilla in the novel Ishmael calls ‘the hum of mother culture.’