Is The Positive News Being Ignored?
I must be the only one in the world.
I must be the only person whose children’s closest friends are a multicultural mix: African American, white, Latino, black Jewish, Ethiopian, Colombian and Ghanaian.
And I have to be the only person who recently attended a dinner party with people from a different cultural background - in this case, Latino - and was more struck by our similarities than our differences.
Surely I’m alone in having ever received a card like the one we got two years ago from a couple my husband and I had met on our honeymoon. When this friendly California couple learned that we were expecting a baby boy, they exuberantly informed us they were expecting a girl a few weeks afterward.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” they wrote, “if our daughter and your son could one day meet, fall in love and get married - and honeymoon in Greece like we all did?”
The couple that wrote this, and the blond daughter whose photo they later sent us, are white.
I must be the only one in the world having such experiences because everything I read in the paper, see on the news and hear in casual conversation suggests that America’s various races and cultures have never been more separate or hostile. Over and over, I’m inundated with data about our alarming divisions. With how we just aren’t communicating across color lines.
Yet I can’t go to a mall or a movie without seeing interracial couples of every persuasion. I know black men married to white women, white men married to black women and have seen every other possible combination.
Surely some of these folks are communicating.
Almost as weird is the excitement with which most of America has greeted Tiger Woods and his record-busting Masters golf win, and the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s enormously difficult integration of baseball’s major leagues.
Who knows how deep any of the surface acceptance that I’m seeing goes? I can’t peer into the hearts of those closest to me, let alone strangers. I know that there are folks uncomfortable with Woods’ triumphs and who remember Robinson only with resentment. Nearly every day, I’m made acutely aware - by a salesclerk’s rudeness, a passer-by’s nervousness or a writer’s skewed story in my own newspaper - that some people dislike or mistrust blacks based on their skin color. And vice versa.
But to focus only on divisions while ignoring the warmth and acceptance out there is to lie. It ignores the spiritual law that says that embracing good invites more of it into your life. Even if I’m the only one who remembers.
Clearly, I’m not. I know others who feel a disconnect between the everyone’s-at-odds rhetoric and the genuine tolerance they often experience. And it isn’t just a black-white thing.
Margaret Hoyos, an Arizona-born Latina, also feels she’s “living in the middle” between hope and hostility. Hoyos, a writer for the National Education Association, grew up in a very insular Latino family, yet has “very close” Latino, black, Asian and white friends.
But she’s painfully aware “of anti-immigrant efforts … of people who don’t want people speaking anything but English,” she says. “I see the attitude that says you’re not a full citizen unless you prove yourself beyond a shadow of doubt. … I feel it.”
“But in my personal life, I have good neighbors … great co-workers and friends of all races. … They remind me that the negative experiences I have are not necessarily the way the world is.”
Still, life in the middle leaves Hoyos feeling “confused. … It doesn’t seem as clear-cut as to how I should be with other people.”
I feel the same way, and I hate it. It’s wearying enough, jumping over the walls erected by my own painful experiences with prejudice without having to pole-vault over negativity supplied by a culture obsessed with things that don’t work and a media that thinks “news” is the bad stuff that happens.
Though we can’t control the messages that bombard us, we do have some power over ourselves. “I seek out people who affirm my hopefulness that we have too much in common to be against each other,” says Hoyos. So she’s hopeful.
In the midst of madness, we interpret for ourselves the world’s conflicting messages and create our own world of experience. We own our experiences, as we own our hair, the shape of our hands, the particular way our jawlines flow from ear to chin.
It’s all about flowing. Each time we let a limited, negative vision of how far apart we are control us, we snatch ourselves out of the love that always flows, often invisibly, around us.
Then it truly feels as if you’re the only one in the world.
xxxx