In the blink of an eye, we’ve gone from
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” to “Fear what your country can do to you.”
That’s
what it feels like now, and I’m not the only one who feels this way. I would so
much rather be writing about something else right now, something not so real,
but this has to come first.
I am a writer of fiction. Mysteries,
horror stories, fantasy, science fiction. That’s what I do, how I express
myself. Some people think I’m good at it. Some of them pay money to read my
stories, and I’m still amazed when I think about that, and I’m grateful.
But,
lately, I’ve hit a snag. I can’t write fiction right now, and it’s been that
way for the last two weeks. My total output during that time has been to finish
a short story I’d started weeks earlier, and I can’t seem to get my head
together enough to start something new. There’s too much real world stuff
jamming the signals that usually provide me with a seemingly endless supply of
characters and situations and concepts. Too much has happened in the past
fortnight and it’s been consuming too many of my thoughts, to an extent that
the fiction can’t break through. So, I need to bend my creative energies toward
real life matters for a change, and maybe it will unblock me, and maybe, in the
best case scenario, it will do some good to somebody else. I don’t know, but
this is all I have right now, and it might meander and it might seem to drift
from subject to subject and change directions a dozen times before I’m done,
but I’ll give it a shot, because I don’t
know what else to do with words right now.
Being
able to write fiction, being able to let my imagination flow free and create
worlds is a privilege I can enjoy because of the freedom of expression I have
as an American, and while I’ve never written specifically about what it means
to be an American, it is the condition of the nation during my lifetime that
has influenced me, perhaps usually unconsciously, but I cannot deny that it has
to have had an impact. And now that condition of the country is under threat,
and how heavy that threat will be remains to be seen, but it does not look
good. So, if I am to continue to write, I must address this.
I
am a writer, as I’ve already said. But what else am I? I don’t like to label
myself in too many ways, because I’m always changing, at least in personal
ways, if not in ways that can be detected by anyone viewing me from the
outside. I’ve never called myself a Democrat or a Republican, or a Conservative
or a Liberal, and that’s because I don’t think I’m capable of taking a bundle
of ideas and accepting them as whole. I prefer to judge individual issues. I
don’t vote for parties, but I do vote for candidates. I’m not a Democrat or
Republican. I’m not a Conservative or Liberal. I’m a human being who tries to
make the right decision, whether those choices are personal and effect only me
or go beyond my own life and impact the lives of others, and I look for that sense
of responsibility in the candidates I choose to support and vote for.
I
voted in this year’s election, and this time the choice was an obvious one. We
had, on one hand, a candidate with political experience, an imperfect person
(because there’s no such thing as a perfect person) who would have probably
made an acceptable president for these United States. Maybe a good one, maybe
even a great one. At the very least, she had business running. So I voted for
her, and so, it seems, did many, many other Americans.
She
was the obvious choice. For many of us, she was the only choice, because, on
the other side, was a man completely unqualified for the job, a man with a
personality that comes across as completely unlikable, a man whose campaign was
fueled by reprehensible statements on his part, statements and stances that
brought out the worst, not the best, in many of those who expressed hope that
he would win. Even his campaign slogan came across as an insult to the very
nation he was pursuing a chance to lead.
I
didn’t think he had a real chance to win. I thought the vast majority of my
fellow Americans would resist the idea of such a man holding one of the most
powerful positions in the world. And then the unthinkable happened. He won. He
won, at least, via the electoral college, if not the popular vote. And it felt
(to many of us; it’s not just me) like a nightmare, and it still does, and it
gets worse every day as we see the people he’s appointing to his staff, people
with, in some cases, histories and opinions that should be repugnant to human
beings who care what happens to other human beings. And he demonstrates more
and more each day that he has, apparently, no idea of the scope and nature of
the job he’s campaigned himself into.
This
is frightening. This is disturbing. This is bizarre and absurd and tragic and
dangerous. This is very, very bad. Bad for all of us, potentially worse for
some of us.
In
past elections, I’ve preferred one candidate over another, but I’ve always felt
that, regardless of who won, we would be all right and that America would still
be America. Now, for the first time in my life, I am afraid of what the next
president will do to this nation, what those he chooses to help him do his job
will do to it, and what his followers and supporters will perceive his victory
as a license to do to their fellow human beings. We should all be afraid of
this.
With
that little preamble out of the way, I’m not sure where to go with this next.
There are so many things I feel compelled to say, so I’m just going to let it
flow.
A
Memory
I've told this story several times since
this whole Trump thing started, first months ago when the whole idea of him
winning the election seemed absurd, and again post-election, as the racism of some
of his cabinet appointees became apparent and some of their ideas became known.
Now, I’ll tell it again.
My great-grandmother was born in 1899. She was
the youngest of 13 children and the only one born in the United States. The
rest were born in Germany and the family, once they moved here, kept close
contact (mostly through letters back then) with their relatives back there.
When I was a kid
and she was in her 80s and 90s, I loved visiting her; I was fascinated by how
old she was, by the stories she would tell, and I think she liked having an
audience. She died in 1996. One day, when I was maybe 7 or 8, she showed me an
album with photos from the 1930s. In one picture, 2 of her older brothers were
fooling around on the banks of a local river, just 2 young men having a good
time. But I noticed one of their shirts. A T-shirt adorned with a swastika.
Even at that age, I knew what it was, I knew what it represented, I knew that
it stood for what my grandfather (her son-in-law) had risked his life to fight
against. So I was shocked to see it on a relative of mine (one who died before
I was born). She saw my confusion and tried to explain.
"You have to
understand," she said, "that at the time, we thought it was just a
political party back home in Germany. We had no idea what would happen. We
didn't realize, we didn't understand until it was too late." And as she
said that to me, I could hear her voice crack, and I could tell she didn't want
to talk about it, maybe couldn't bear to talk about it. I turned to the next
page in the album and that part of the conversation ended right there, but I
never forgot the way her voice sounded at that moment, and I never heard her
sound that way again for any reason. It truly scares me that things are
happening now, and here, that have me thinking of that moment so often.
An
Education
There’s always
been racism (and other forms of discrimination) in the world, in the United
States, and we’ve always known it’s there,
and sometimes it’s more obvious than at other times. Lately, it’s just spewing
forth all over the place, like all the toxic sludge that’s been pooling in the
minds of bigots has suddenly been given permission to puke itself out all over
the targets it’s always wanted to hit.
I’m watching all
this racism drip out of the woodwork and wondering where it comes from. I’ve
never thought it through in detail before and there are probably two reasons
for that lack of analysis on my part. First, as a white male I’ve rarely been
the target of any racially-motivated negativity, and, second, I don’t feel the
impulse toward being a racist in myself. But now I sit here thinking about
where it comes from and I have to theorize that it must be most common in those
whose life experience has been very, very limited in terms of their
interactions with those who don’t share their skin color or religion or
sexuality.
I was born in and
grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. I went to school there. It’s a city where the
school system is a mess. The elementary school I attended was one of the better
ones in the city, but high school was different. I remember going there and, at
the same time, knowing kids who went to school in neighboring areas like Wayne
and West Paterson and being jealous of the fact that they were being taught
things that were far ahead of what the Paterson high schools were offering.
There in John F. Kennedy High School, we barely scratched the surface of basic
science, hardly got into history at all, and it often seemed like we were all
trapped in a factory that’s only goal was to provide enough education to
squeeze the kids through the system and spit them out into the world so the
public schools wouldn’t have to be responsible for them anymore. I felt bad for
the teachers who tried their best but were up against too many obstacles. In
terms of learning the subjects after which our classes were named, it was not a
good experience.
The deficiencies
of the school were not the fault of the students, although it is true that many
of them had no desire, it seemed, to learn anything, or to even try.
And I’ve often
blamed the school for giving me a lousy education and for making me feel like I
didn’t want to go on to college because I needed to get away from that system
for a while, and I never really went back. Now, years later, most people assume
I went to college, because I’m a writer and I seem to know things about various
topics. But my “education” has been self-endowed. I read, I listen, I watch.
So, yes, my formal
education was lacking in many ways. But now, in the light of all the racism and
other vileness being spewed about the country, I realize that my four years at
JFKHS gave me another sort of education, a kind that is very important in a
world of discrimination and categorization and Donald Trump’s influence and the
atrocious attitudes of his fans.
What I said
earlier about life experiences that involve interactions with people who aren’t
just like you, well, that’s what I had in high school. For four years of my
life, for seven or eight hours each day, in that little microcosm of the world,
I was in the vast minority. The
student body of JFKHS was about 40% Latino, 40% black, and about 10% Muslim,
with the rest a mixture of Asian, Indian, and white. In my graduating class,
there where, if I recall correctly, four white kids: me and one other having
been born right there in Paterson and the other two being immigrants from
Eastern Europe.
Now, I cannot
possibly compare that short period of time to being a minority all the time,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for a lifetime, but it gave me just
the tiniest hint of what that’s like, and, even more importantly, it showed me
the fundamental fact that all the differences between us are just minor details
in the grand scheme of life and we are all human, all much more similar than we
are different.
It didn’t take
long before I stopped seeing those differences on anything more than a very
superficial level, because I got to know my fellow students as people and not
as categories. Some of them I liked, some of them I disliked. A few of them, I
loved, and still do to this day. One of them remains among the most important
people in my life. People. Not categories or colors or religions. People.
That’s why I
wonder if the loud racists, the ones screaming on Twitter and pumping their
fists in a zombie-like Trump victory dance and chanting about building walls
and threatening people who don’t look just like them and acting like obnoxious
assholes, have ever actually spent any time around the people they want to pass
judgment on. Because it doesn’t take very long, unless you’re determined to
keep the categorization at the forefront of your mind, to stop seeing the
details and just see the people.
I think back to
those days now (twenty-one years after graduation) and the memories are about
personalities and words and actions, not about the trivial details of
categories. The fact that M celebrated Ramadan and not Christmas was not a
concern. I was more concerned about what he could do for the school’s baseball
team. I didn’t care what language my friends spoke at home or when they talked
to their other friends, as long as they spoke to me in English, because
otherwise I would have had no idea what they were saying. When I got sick on
the senior class trip, did I care that my roommate in the hotel was black? Of
course not, because I was too busy being grateful that he wanted to make sure I
was all right and that he helped me clean up after I vomited on the bed. I think
of K, and in my memories I don’t consider the detail of her being
Filipino-American, but I do recall how she moved to the area that last year of
high school and very quickly accepted me for who I was and, since we had the
same class schedule, we walked to each class together and were very good,
comfortable friends.
And I think of S
and my gratitude for her friendship knows no limit and I’m filled with joy at
the fact that after a very regrettable separation of nearly two decades (that’s
a story for another time), we are friends again and that feels so, so right,
and I never want her to go away again, and her ethnicity does not factor into
that set of emotions in the least.
All of us from
that time were thrown into that place, that JFKHS because of where and when we
happened to exist, and we were all human beings and the little, stupid,
specific details of our lives (those things that others might see as big
important categories) mattered very, very little in the long run.
An
Incident
As I just finished
saying, I now consider having gone to school where I did to have been a
positive experience in some ways, but I don’t mean to imply that no racism and
no negativity existed between the various people in that place. A high school
is, after all, a microcosm of society and conflict exists everywhere.
Yes, there were
ethnic conflicts, and they sometimes erupted into violence, and they often
involved gangs made up of this ethnicity or that fighting others. The
Dominicans having a problem with the Colombians or other such stuff that the
rest of us kept out of.
But I don’t recall
much open racial bitterness among those who weren’t members of one of those
gangs. Sure, there was an occasional racially-based insult thrown around, but
not as often as one might expect there to be in such a melting pot of people. I
suppose those who weren’t used to being around those of other racial or ethnic
or religious backgrounds might have been surprised by the cultural differences
at first, but that seemed to fade away as they settled into the routine of the
place.
However, there was
one incident that I’m going to talk about here and now.
This is a story
almost nobody knows. I haven’t talked about it much over the years. I would
rather keep it to myself, but I feel it’s important to the reason I’m writing
this whole blog post to try to describe how the incident made me feel then and
how it makes me feel now, two decades later.
Earlier, I said
that I have rarely known what it’s like to be the target of racially-motivated
negativity. If you wondered why I said, “rarely” instead of “never,” this is the part where I
explain.
It was either
sophomore or junior year of high school. I think it was junior year, but I’m
not certain after all this time. I was in the locker room changing back to my
regular clothes after gym class. I was alone at a bench between two banks of
lockers, minding my own business, putting my sweatpants into my bag and a
fastening the belt of my regular pants when I became aware of someone standing
nearby. I turned and saw three boys watching me. I didn’t know them, and I’m
sure they weren’t in my grade. They were probably seniors, a year or two older
than me. They were black.
They stepped
closer. The way they moved toward me scared me. I zipped my bag shut as quickly
as I could. I just wanted to get out of there as all my instincts screamed
danger.
I didn’t cause any
trouble in high school. I was a quiet, shy kid and kept to myself except when
talking with teachers or with my few close friends, some of whom I mentioned in
the previous section of this essay. I did nothing to instigate this incident. I
went to gym class, which I hated, participated the best I could for a clumsy
person, and was just getting dressed to go to my next class.
But they came
closer, and one of them shouted the words, “White motherfucker,” and they were
on me.
Fists slammed into
my ribs, my back, my sides, my stomach. I was shoved up against the lockers and
hit a few more times. Three against one, fast, furious, brutal. I had no chance
to defend myself, no chance to flee. I managed to step away from the lockers so
I was no longer pinned in place. And I stepped into the open space between the
lockers and the bench and one of them hit me one last time, hard. I fell. I hit
the floor hard and my glasses scraped across my face as they flew off, opening
a gash on my forehead and the bridge of my nose.
My attackers ran.
They laughed as they went. I stayed on the floor for a minute and tried to
figure out what had just happened.
The shock subsided
enough for me to pick myself up. I found my glasses and they were intact. I
went into the bathroom, used toilet paper to slow the bleeding.
I walked to the
nurse’s office, asked for some band-aids, and patched myself up.
And I lied to the
nurse about what had happened. I made up a story about walking into a barbell
in the weight room.
The lie was to
protect myself, because the school had a policy that anybody involved in a
fight would be suspended no matter who started it, and I didn’t want that on my
record and I didn’t want any more trouble. I just wanted it to be over.
I hate being
involved in violence. Even if I’m on the winning end of the fight (which I was
in the only other fight I’d ever been in, a silly afterschool bout in the
seventh grade), it makes me guilty and sick.
I didn’t tell my
parents what had happened. I didn’t want them to worry about me.
I didn’t tell my
friends at school. I didn’t want them to think less of me for having lost a
fight, although I later realized I didn’t lose a fight, but was ambushed and
beaten, which is an entirely different thing.
I’ve told that
story once or twice in the years since, but I’ve mostly kept it to myself.
For the next few
days, I looked for those guys in the hallways, but I was never sure who they
were. There were 2,000 students in the school and I couldn’t know all of them.
And it all happened so fast, and maybe hitting my head on that locker room
floor made it all a bit blurry afterwards.
I soon felt normal
again. I wasn’t afraid to go to school after the incident. It was the same
place, the same mixture of good and bad, and I just happened to be the victim
of one of the bad things that day.
For a while, I was
angry. I’m still a little angry when I think about it now, because I was
innocent and I became the target of someone else’s anger because I just
happened to be there at that moment.
Based on what one
of them said before they hit me, my race was the reason they did what they did.
A coworker I told the story to responded to it with some racial slurs about
black people. He seemed to think I should be angry at everybody who looks like
those three unidentified attackers. That’s ludicrous. There were 2,000 students
in the place. Forty percent were black. Some of that forty percent were my
friends. Most of them, I didn’t know personally. Three of them hurt me. Three
out of two-thousand. That’s not enough to influence my opinion of anyone beyond
those three, never mind an entire race.
So, yes, I knew,
for those few painful, frightening moments, what it was like to have a racial
remark shouted at me and to be hit and hit and hit again and be left bleeding
on a cold, hard floor. And that was among the most terrifying moments of my
life and I would never wish that on anyone.
I had that small
sample, and I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have to live with
that fear all the time. And now that fear, the sense that these things can and
do happen to people because of their skin color or their religion or their
sexuality has been inflated by the results of the recent election. It doesn’t
matter if the president-elect meant to inspire some of his supporters to be
emboldened to express their hateful views and act according to those views. It
doesn’t matter one damn bit if he meant to do that. It happened and it’s
horrifying.
It had been a long
time since I’d thought of that locker room attack. But that memory has been
replaying in my mind a lot since the
election and the disturbing events that have followed it. I didn’t want to
revisit that piece of my past, but it’s in rotation now and I had to write
about it here.
It seems the
chances of a person being attacked because of race may have increased in recent
times, instead of decreasing, which is what should be happening as the world
learns from past mistakes, but maybe we’ve taken a step backwards. Nobody
should have to fear being the subject of violence because of the color of their
skin, whether black, white, or anything else. I don’t want anybody, anywhere,
to have to feel what I felt in that locker room.
Those
Silly Little Details, Magnified
From my reply to a
friend’s Facebook post two days after the election:
There's something
going on these past few days that I find so disturbing that it almost brings me
to tears, and that is the fact that I'm suddenly (out of concern) thinking of
the people I care about in terms of categories, because I'm worried about them
now and scared what those categories will cause other people to say or do to
them.
And I never think
about them that way; it's not the way my mind normally operates. But my best
friend is a woman who grew up in Brazil, and I rarely think about her ethnicity
or accent, and now I worry she'll be the target of "wall" comments.
And my oldest
friend--who I wouldn't have made it through high school without and who was,
when I was an awkward teenage outcast, one of the few people I really felt
understood me--wears a hijab, which I don't even notice or think about
normally, but now I'm terrified she'll have to put up with bullshit and abuse
because of that piece of clothing.
And I worry about
the several dozen new relatives-in-law I'll soon have because of my brother's
imminent marriage to a black woman, and I worry that there are now people
walking around who will feel emboldened to say what they may have only thought
before recent developments and give them grief for having an interracial
relationship.
And I'm worried
about my Jewish friends having to hear anti-Semitic stuff being yelled because
some of these Trump fans seem to be basking in the Hitler comparisons instead
of doing what anybody with any sense of history should have been doing, which
of course is running into that voting booth and choosing Hillary Clinton.
This is the 21st
century and suddenly I'm thinking of my friends in terms of race and religion
and nation of origin and sexuality in addition to who they are in personality,
because I'm suddenly worried that those details of their lives will make them
potential targets for the assholes who think it's acceptable behavior to judge
a human being based on skin color or head-wear or what they do in the privacy
of their bedrooms.
And I'm not
supposed to be thinking about them in this way, but now I am, because I'm
worried. I should not have to be sitting here feeling like I should call these
people and tell them that I'm here if they need me because of any problems that
arise because of what's happened this week. This is so, so, so wrong. And I
really want this feeling to go away.
And now, fourteen
days after the election:
The
president-elect still hasn’t formally or forcefully renounced those committing
hateful acts or speaking hateful words in his name, except for a few brief
statements during two interviews saying, “They should stop it,” and then, “I
disavow them.” Instead, he’s spent more time whining on social media about the
way a group of actors at a play his running mate attended addressed the vice-president-elect
(in what looked to most of us as a respectful request for the man to not
violate their rights when he assumes office). And he’s complaining about the
way he’s been portrayed by an actor on Saturday Night Live, as if he’s the only
politician ever to be made fun of on a comedy show (it comes with being a
public figure!). Meanwhile, white supremacists are making Nazi salutes and
chanting “Hail Trump!” and he hasn’t put much effort at all into denouncing
that, and he’s appointing cabinet members with vile records of racism and other
absolutely disgusting points of view.
And I had lunch
the other day with my old friend, the one who wears the scarf, and she’s
terrified that her children, her Muslim children who were born in the United
States and raised in the United States and had for a mother one of the best
people I’ve ever known and have been good kids and have been pretty lucky in
life so far, may soon have to face real, brutal discrimination and harassment
for the first time in their lives, here, in America, where we should be long
past things like that happening.
Yes, nasty things
like that have always happened, and, unfortunately, they probably always will,
but now it seems as if we’ve gone backwards a few steps and those in power, or
soon to be coming into power, are some of those who would applaud and encourage
those backward steps.
I’m being forced
to think of people I care about in terms of categories, and I don’t like it one
bit, but I’m worried, and my mind keeps going back to that photo album of
Great-Grandma’s.
On
Religion and Respect
I don’t like
religion. I have no use for it in my life, at least as far as practicing it
goes. My mind is the type that requires evidence in order to believe in
something, and I see no evidence presented in any of the world’s religions, so
I cannot subscribe to any of them.
I do find religion
interesting, though. How could I not, as it’s had such an impact on human
behavior and history. As an artist, I find its symbolism fascinating. And I’m
aware that it plays a part in the lives of many, many people.
Religion is as
much a target for hate and discrimination as race is, and that’s at the
forefront of the news in these post-election weeks, with Anti-Semitic vandalism
showing up more prominently, and Anti-Muslim rhetoric increasing. And it’s
upsetting and it’s horrifying and human beings should not be subject to this.
Religion is a
little different than race or ethnicity as far as how it should be judged,
because religion, unlike those other things, is not a detail that nature or
geography bestows on a human being.
Rather, it is a form of behavior, and that behavior can have positive or
negative consequences for the believer’s fellow human beings. Good has been
done in the name of religion, and so has evil. That evil is unfortunate and
anyone performing such acts should have to pay a price for their misdeeds.
But it is
extremely wrong to judge all the followers of a religion by the deeds of the
percentage who commit acts of terrorism or violence or whatever the case may
be. And it is obscenely wrong to assume that a person is your enemy or deserves
to be feared or hated or slandered or assaulted or killed because of no data
other than their religion.
As an American, I
respect the right of any human being to follow the religion of their choice,
provided, of course, that they do not use it as an excuse to inflict harm on
anyone else.
Based on what I’ve
seen in life, there are such different degrees of a person’s involvement with
religion (any religion), that to judge them based solely on that is ludicrous.
Some people follow a religion only out of tradition because they had it handed
down to them by their parents and it has little bearing on their day to day
life. Others belief deeply and sincerely but keep it to themselves or share it
only with those who practice or worship with them. Some talk about it often and
openly but either don’t try to convince others of its validity or, at worst, do
try to convert others but in a harmless, mostly just annoying way. I have no
issue with most of those people, no matter which religion they follow in any of
those mostly harmless ways (and I just avoid the annoying ones in that last
group).
So, what does that
leave? It leaves the extremists, the ones who, for whatever reason, decide to
use that religion as an excuse to inflict pain on their fellow human beings.
That’s reprehensible, but it should never be assumed that a person is one of
those monsters simply because he or she subscribes to the same religion as
those guilty parties (we’re talking about large religions here, those with
thousands or millions of followers, not the little cults and other exceptions
like, for example, the followers of Charles Manson, who had their own sort of
bizarre religion going on. With little groups like that, I’d say it’s perfectly
fine to judge them all as dangerous).
This, in theory,
is where the problem starts. It seems that sometimes the followers of one
religion can’t see past the fact that not all followers of another religion are
extremists or fanatics. Let’s take, for example, the largest religion in the
United States, which is Christianity (we’ll disregard, at the moment, the many
subdivisions of Christianity and just treat it as one large religion). How
offended or insulted would a Christian be if someone assumed every Christian
acted or thought like those that make up the infamous Westboro Baptist Church
(an absolutely monstrous organization based on hate), or the Ku Klux Klan? But,
take a Christian who, like many people, can’t see a person of a different
religion as anything but a piece of the religion (thus ignoring everything else
about that person or not bothering to learn anything else about that person
before passing judgment) and he may act as if every Muslim must be of the same
mindset as a member of Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
Religion, for the
vast majority of human beings is, I think, a detail of who they are, not the
essential core of who they are. Whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or
whatever, we all have more in common than we have differences. It’s just that
tendency some of us have of seeing a person of a religion other than ours as
the religion and not as a human being who happens to practice it, that keeps us
from realizing that.
Stop and think
about that for a minute. I’m not talking about fanatics and extremists. There
are some of those, yes, but to assume all people of a religion (unless it’s your religion) have that fanatic or
extremist inside them, makes you the one with the problem, not them.
In all
probability, that Muslim woman in the supermarket, the one you imagine in your
mind looking at you and thinking you’re an “infidel” and wanting to blow you
up, is thinking nothing of the sort. She’s shopping. She’s buying food to feed
her family, just like you are. But she’s dressed differently than you think she
should be and it makes you uncomfortable because you can’t see a person who’s
not just like you as anything but a symbol of something that scares you because
you don’t understand it (maybe because you’ve never bothered to try, maybe
because you just don’t have any experience at being around people who aren’t
just like you, and maybe because you’re just too damn stubborn to give people a
chance).
People are not
caricatures. It’s more complex than that. Religion is not the defining
characteristic of most people. But it’s also simpler than that, because
religion, in most cases, is a detail, not an identity. What is the identity,
then? It’s humanity, and we have most of that in common with each other, more
in common than different, regardless of which tradition or faith or lack
thereof we believe in.
The moment you
assume an individual is an extremist or fanatic based solely on the fact that
they belong to a different religion than you do, it is YOU who have become the
extremist.
On
Sexuality
I don’t care one
bit what anybody does in the bedroom unless I’m in there with them.
The fact that Mike
Pence has spent so much of his career worrying about that issue is disturbing.
The
Big Question
If you’re one of
those people who judges or hates or discriminates against those who are
slightly different than you are in terms of race or religion or sexuality or
ethnicity and you treat them as less than human because of those details,
rather than look at all the things you have in common with them, which is
everything except those details, I want an answer to this question:
What are you so
afraid of?
Do you even know?
Or are you acting out of habit, out of tradition, out of selfishness because
you fear change and you fear interaction with what you don’t understand, or out
of being too lazy to attempt to see the reality that we are all human despite
the silly little details that we turn into such a big deal?
To those of you
who can’t look past the little details, to those of you who think it’s wise to
chant about walls being built and try to force your religion or your opinion of
what’s right or wrong sexually on people who aren’t bothering you in any way,
shape, or form, and to those of you who let those little details and differences
override your ability to see human beings instead of caricatures and threats,
do you know what you really are? You’re a bunch of cowards!
Look at these
people and try to see past all the details. See the human beings. Talk to them.
You don’t know what will happen, but you’ll probably learn something, and you
might even make connections that will change your life in positive ways.
The alternative is
misery, if not for you then for someone else who has every bit as much a right
to live, to succeed, to enjoy the freedoms that are part of what a properly
functioning America is supposed to be.
That alternative
is an ugly thing, and we’re seeing a bit more of that ugly thing lately.
Is that what you want? To live in a racist
world, a segregated world, a divided world? That would mean a world where an
infinite number of potential connections, friendships, discoveries, and loves
were prevented before they even had a possibility of happening. A world of fear
and racism and xenophobia is a world of lost opportunities. America deserves
better than that. Every human being deserves better than that.
