diversity of thought | A Sagittarian Seeker

April 18, 2021- One of the things I realized last night is that my true friends have stuck with me, over several ups and downs-and they are patient, through my peregrinations and inconvenient expressions of opinion. There are those, on the outer edge, who moved on at the earliest opportunity, but they never chose to come inside the circle.

There are friends who have worked at the most difficult of professions, and have shown nothing but fortitude. They are still delighted to see me, now and then. There are friends who are masters at making everyone who crosses their path feel welcome-and mean it. They wish that I would come around more often. There are friends who believe in the basic tenets in which I believe, and wish I could adhere even more to their way of thinking, but who make me feel cherished, anyway.

There are friends who hug, and mean every bit of it. There are friends who are content with a handshake-or an elbow bump, and will be glad when the pandemic is over. There are friends who prefer no physical contact-and that has nothing to do with COVID; it’s just who they are. Their hearts are still full of caring.

There are friends who are conservative, and merely want to see people earn what they get. There are friends who are progressive, and want to see long-standing wrongs get righted. There are friends who are in-between, and see worthy tenets on both sides. There are friends who are more comfortable with children and there are friends who prefer to be with elders. There are friends who prefer to be with only a few, select people.

They have all added a major blessing, or two, to my life, and I would be loathe to see any of them go. The true circle of friends remains unbroken, even as others come and go from its periphery.

December 11, 2019-

In the film, “King of the Gypsies”, the late Sterling Hayden plays the titular role, and remarks, upon encountering a different group of Roma: “Whose Gypsies are these?” It struck me as a curious thing for anyone to say-as I never have taken to the idea of one human being owning another-or others. Indeed, it was a few years ago that I relinquished use of the possessive pronoun “my”, when referencing any person by name, saving its use solely for clarifying a specific relationship.

I guess this is part of a larger movement in my mind- to get past thoughts of “Us and Them”. Growing up in a small town north of Boston, I was first aware of belonging to two large families, then to the Roman Catholic church, then to a town named Saugus, whose residents, for the most part, were of families whose forebears came from Europe. My education, as to how to regard people who looked different from us, was simple: We were to address them as “Sir”, “Ma’am” or by honorific (Mr._____, Mrs._____). Other kids were always called by their first names. The pejorative for African-Americans (My folks called them coloured people, in the 1950’s) was forbidden in our house. Needless to say, nobody with half a brain would ever have called Mrs. Robinson, who ran the junior high cafeteria, anything other than ” Miss Matron, Ma’am”. Mr. and Mrs. Woo, who had a laundry in Cliftondale Square, on the southeast side of town, were likewise accorded full respect, and the Chang family were pillars of the community.

So there was an early perception, in my head, that anyone who used racial or ethnic slurs was just plain ignorant. To be sure, lots of people moved into Saugus from other places, and brought their less than enlightened ideas about race and ethnicity into the social fabric. I never bought into any of it, and remember feeling sad when four little girls were blown to bits, in Birmingham, and when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, were gunned down. It was as hard for me, as losing the Kennedy brothers.

Nonetheless, there was work for me to do on myself, as so many “harmless” stereotypes and inflections had made their way into my consciousness. My Black fellow soldiers, being as diverse a group as any similar collection of Whites, disabused me of a lot of preconceived notions that growing up in a mostly white community had imparted. To be sure, I have never been physically assaulted by anyone of African ancestry. I can’t say the same about my fellow Euro-Americans.

Gradually, I outgrew stereotypes about other groups of people, all residual from what I had observed in others, over the period of my childhood and adolescence. My inclusive views finally came full circle, when the humanity of those who spouted unfortunate views of exclusion and bigotry became apparent, without my having to adopt their way of thinking. Some people just need more patience than others.

So, it is with a fair degree of incredulity, that I hear one group or another say: “The People won’t stand for this!” To paraphrase Mr. Hayden’s character, ” To which people do you refer?” All humans are people-and while appealing to their humanity is hard, sometimes exasperating, work, I feel I can do no less.