Picking Up Where I Left Off Repeating Myself Again

So, after the family from Detroit moved into the neighbourhood, the parents introducing swinging (and I don't mean dancing, this time), I learned that talking about my friends, who others had labeled with the 'n' word because of their skin colour, tended to get me beaten up by the white guys (pretty much just the front line for our successful junior high school football team, it seems to me in retrospect).

Silence was my best friend throughout junior high and high school.

So, when college came along, I was able to get back with people of any size, shape, belief and colour, without fear of physical harm.

As I mentioned in a long-ago blog entry, the college foursome that when to Fort Myers for spring break caused a stir.

And later, when I finally moved up to supervisor, my first employee happened to have dark skin and which adults now call African-American.

At last, I was free of the negative thoughts that hung over my head for much of my childhood.

I was luckier than many.  My parents provided a home that was free of racial bias.  I watched Bill Cosby on television and listened to Richard Pryor on LP records.  But also watched Andy Griffith on TV and listened to him on LP record.  Cheech and Chong on 45 RPM record (and later, 8-track tape).  Varieties of people on PBS (television) and NPR (radio).

My life has been easy but listening to the perpetuation of negative stereotypes has not been easy.

Turn the other cheek is easier said than done but it provides resistance of another sort.

That's why I support many of the uprisings going on right now around the world because peaceful resistance wins in the long run, although it is painful to bear, including the restructuring of school districts to eliminate, as best we can, racial inequality that still exists today.

Defending oneself is different than fighting for freedom.

We are a very young species and keep learning what works better and better.

Those of us who are here to talk about it are the ones who set the example for ourselves and future generations.

Gandhi and MLKJ may have been rabblerousers of a sort, but they represented a voice that needed and wanted to be heard, just as the people of the American continent wanted to be heard but were ignored by ol' King George and British Parliament in the 1700s (they should have learned that lesson before the Indian subcontinent uprising dozens of years later, huh?).

Our species has thousands of years of cyclical changes ahead of us.  Let's set good examples now, or as many as we can, knowing that people will do what they have to do to feed their families, despite negative consequences for the species on the local/global scale.