come into my mind (and bring a flashlight!)

Here's what came up during the drive home from Baltimore:

From time to time, I've been pondering how our kids are going to fare as adults when interacting with the mainstream culture. We don't have cable TV, so the kids have only a marginal acquaintance with Spongebob. We purposely schedule soccer and swimming for Sat. AM to avoid the commercial advertising directed at kids. The only reality TV show we've ever watched was Queer Eye (when Mama Dee would bring us videotapes) so 'voted off the island' isn't in their construct and the pop icons created by American Idol aren't familiar. The savant and I both jumped off the fashion train long before we met each other and realized a while back that through our age and impatience with commercial radio, we've also fallen off the popular music train. We haven't been inside a mall for at least 4 years except to go to Sears where our optometrist practices. We mostly get our food from our local co-op.

These have all been deliberate choices, but the result is that our kids will have some culture shock to deal with when they grow up. This worried me a bit until I had a revelation.

Some backstory: Saturday, at the [Midwives' Alliance](http://www.mana.org) annual conference, we had a keynote speaker at lunch, Katsi Cook. [Katsi](http://www.birthingthefuture.com/RoleModels/intoOurHands.php) is a Mohawk healer, traditional midwife and environmental researcher whose speech was entitled Woman as the First Environment. She said many fine things but the one that is germane to this rambling is her dislike of the use of the word 'competency' as in 'cultural competency'. In her view, one cannot be culturally competent without speaking the language of the culture, for one example. So we European-Americans who cannot speak Ojibwe will never achieve cultural competency in the First Nation. She suggests instead that we use the term and thought construct of congruency, and speak of/strive for cultural congruency. From my vague remembrance of geometry, congruency applied to geometric shapes of equal area even if they had differing shapes.

So the flashing white light of revelation that came to me while driving was that the kids could certainly be culturally congruent with mainstream culture, and that they would do just fine. In fact, this idea of congruent cultures solidifies the vague swirlings of what we've been trying to achieve by eschewing the rampant commercialism of mainstream culture and replacing it with our own efforts toward simplicity and organic living. Isn't it amazing the difference a word can make?