Over the River and Back in Time to Grandmother's House We Go

How do I even start this one? Emily's Grandmother is nearly 90 years old. This means she was born in 1921. Things must have been much different in 1921, just as they were different in 1975 when I was born. And the beat goes on. After an afternoon visiting Grandma, not everything about the good ol' days was all that good.

Grandma has some opinions about, um, how to put this delicately, people of color. I have a friend whose Facebook status just a couple weeks ago was something to the effect of 'I am tired of people who say that someone who is racist is a good person', or words to that effect. It is hard to disagree with that sentiment. If we all operated under that premise, then perhaps we could finally stanch out this particularly insipid human trait.

But, I can't possibly know what it was like to grow up on a farm during the depression, in the boonies, fighting for everything you had and being completely segregated from anything that looked like diversity. Even the white people segregated themselves from one another. Jews, Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians... all these white Europeans were ghettoized at one time or another. Major cities became enclaves for specific ethnicities. There are to this day more Polacks in Chicago, Illinois than in Warsaw, Poland.

Imagine, with as much division as existed in the white community how one would look at black people. I actually can't imagine it and I think it isn't possible to predict our behavior if we were dropped into that era.

The thing that bothers me most about some of the conversation yesterday was my failure to express my distaste for the tone of her epithets. We didn't take part, we didn't egg on, in fact our lack of response and uncomfortable faces were enough to steer the conversation elsewhere. But why didn't I put my foot down? Why did I not take the opportunity to pontificate?

This is a woman whose family helped build the church, who helped her mentally disabled brother-in-law until his death, who still supports large contingents of her family financially and otherwise, who fears God and votes with the Democrats. This is not a bad person. At 90 years old, the damage is done anyway.

I find it so much more distasteful that Emily's Aunt, who is my parents' age isn't any better than her mother. She was a young person through the civil rights era. I believe being in that place and time would have changed my mind if my mind needed changing. In fact, am confident of that. I still look with horror on the footage of fire hoses being turned on peace marchers. I am still moved by the various speeches and writings of many of the leaders of the movement.

When I smoked cigarettes, my parents expressed their disappointment in my poor decision making. I wasted no time in point out their own smoking habits. Quickly, my Mother countered with the fact that they didn't know any better. When they were young doctors recommended Camels to aid digestion. Need to relax? Have a Pall Mall. Four out of five doctors agree, the rich smooth taste of Winston really satisfies, etcettera.

At the same time, I am not donating to NPR this time around because I am displeased with the firing of Juan Williams. If you don't know the whole story, it will be hard to find it in most of the media, because they do what they often do and shape your opinion for you. His quote indicated he was nervous when he was at the airplane gate and there were people in Muslim garb on the same plane.

On the face of it it was an insensitive and uninciteful comment to be sure. But if you watch the entire interview (which I did only in "virtual-retro-world" because it was on O'Reilly and I won't bide watching that blowhard ignoramus), it is very clear that Juan Williams was simply making a personal observation and was not intending to be insensitive or divisive.

Mr. Williams is a black man. Being a racial minority does not give anyone carte blanche to be a racist, but why can't he express his opinion? How can we get to the core of our differences and come to mutual and universal understanding of them if we are only able to whisper in homogeneous groups of like-thinking people? I think personally, NPR made a racial issue out of what really galled them... one of their commentators has been making the rounds lately on the "wrong kind" of shows. NPR took off its sweater vest and bore its bleeding heart in grand fashion and fired Mr. Williams, who is not a news presenter but a news commentator, for daring to express his opinion in a conservative outlet like "The O'Reilly Factor."

Clearly they forget that in the eight years of the Bush II administration, Williams was the only NPR representative to get a sit-down with the president. And they accused him of softballing then. What we have is a black guy who identified himself as conservative and reached out to a conservative audience and the mostly left-leaning NPR couldn't handle it.

I can't remember all the borderline offensive things the great Daniel Schorr said in the decade I listened to him before his death earlier this year. That's why I loved him! He made me think about why the things he said pulled at me and twanged me and shook my core! He made me question my convictions and examine their genesis. He was also a "News Analyst" as NPR calls their commentators. And they took great pains to point that out when listeners would voice their disdain for Schorr's often abrasive comments. After all, he wasn't reporting the news, he was offering commentary. Juan Williams was not given the same latitude because his pervading viewpoint and the audience to which it was directed was not in the pantheon of NPR's reach.

The point of this digression is that as a species I believe we are pre-programmed to seek out the things and people that make us comfortable and surround ourselves with them be they religious convictions, political opinions, sexual orientations, race and gender. If we aren't going to be racists, we'll be sexists, ageists, homophobes and political racists (look it up, it's a real term).

If we ever hope to be truly together as one and defeat the problems that plague us as a human society, we better discover our differences, wade through them, find the common ground and move forward as one entity.