Learn and Do Otherwise…

So many times we talk about how we were brought up and what we learned and/or inherited from our parents or the people at our churches, or synagogues, or at boy scouts. We talk about our physical attributes and habitual social quirk all the time: we got our eyes from this relative, our body shape from the other, the temper that flares can be ascribed to our ethnicity. These instances aside, most times, we do comparisons regarding the negative aspects of our personalities, habits, or thoughts. Meaning, usually, although we may honor this person or that person (usually after they have passed on from this life) for their positive contribution or contributions to us, generally-speaking positive credit is ascribed far less than blame for our shortcomings.

We spend inordinate amounts of time assigning blame to others for how we have turned out as adults. We assign others with the “credit” for how and who we are. Case-in-point, we turned out the way we did because our mother was an alcoholic, our father a drug-dealer, or our mother didn’t show us enough love as a child, or father was a workaholic and cold, hardly showing affection.

I would propose that if we spent less time using the people who introduced us to bad habits, addictions, warped senses of understanding, and the like, as whipping boards for what is “ours,” and instead saw them and their influence on us as pivotal moments in our lives, perhaps we would be far happier people. Happier, I say? Yes, happier. Because we would be more inclined to living our true selves.

Bear with me, here, as I elaborate.

Your mother and/or father were overly-critical. At 40 – 50 years old, you yourself notice that you have eerily similar tendencies to nit-pick, or to be overly sensitive to things being just so. Mind you, as a child, or growing up, you hated this quality, this trait about your parent. But somehow as you practice the same thing you have learned, you forget to think how it feels to be on the receiving end of their criticism, often unrelenting scrutiny, in a moment that is very vulnerable for the other person. You have forgotten the visceral response you had to the act of pouring acid on an open wound. Brutal analogy but is it really that “off” when one thinks about how opposite what the perpetrator must have been thinking was prior to being faced with the reality that he or she now faces?

So maybe if and when those moments come about when we find yourself identifying these bothersome traits, perhaps instead of falling victim to replicating those traits, we saw it for what it was, we would realize that even as we have lived through it – felt the pain, the betrayal, the sting, the shunning – we felt it so that we could know its effects first-hand and choose to do something different. There was a lesson in it all. If it were intended that we should be shackled by things that happened to us, we would be an extension, a continuation of our parents, or perpetual victims of our situations. But as genetics would have it, we are a totally different organism from anyone else in the world. Our unique genetic combination provides us with the opportunity to do and to be something altogether different from our two chromosomal donors. In short, we inherit stuff, yes, but our experiences are only raw material. We get the chance to interpret and move a thing one step further by either perpetuating it or killing it at the root by speaking out against it: the bigotry, the hatred, the wrongness of a thing. Or by beginning a correction to a thing through a simple act, setting a different course for the future of a thought or a movement.  Either way, intentionally or not, we always pay it forward.

We actually have that power. We have this capacity. And we possess this capability because we have a conscience that continuously cries out NOT to be suppressed about our moral receptors. Pain is uncomfortable, yes. It is not pleasant, and therefore most folks don’t want to necessarily experience it. And those of us who learn to become “comfortable” with the pain, do so only at the risk of being desensitized to what pain is supposed to do. Pain is intended to be a signal that something that is being done is offensive to us, in some way or another. Whether literally or figuratively, it is to tell us that something is wrong with our body, or that we have exceeded our threshold, or else to alarm us to be aware of some act or thought or sentiment that is being forced on us that is out of the ordinary. At the very least, it calls us to attention.

So then enter the assertion that out of painful experiences, one can experience happiness. If pain without remedy is unhappiness because things remain unresolved, then pain that leads to realization of the source of our illness, brings relief and sets us on the road to remedying the situation. And this makes us both relieved and happy. How many people have spoken of the moment that they recognized a pain that led them to the doctor, that led to a diagnosis of the presence of a cancer that enabled them to live through bouts of cancer treatment – the operative word being “live”? It was seen as a mixed blessing not because anyone wants cancer. But if you have cancer and can do something to overcome the challenge, wouldn’t most people want to? Even people who profess to have faith do not truly know they have faith until challenged by circumstances that put that faith to the test.

I return to my original proposal: that each of us would do well to give ourselves permission to think about the things that we have learned and have allowed to become part of our habits, practices and thinking, and test the outcomes of these actions and attitudes as they have played out in our individual lives. Heck, even to measure the weight of our practices by our hearts: If it makes us more empathetic, more understanding, more patient, more well-rounded and yet better decision-makers, then yay for our “education!” If not, perhaps we need to own what we have done with what we’ve inherited. Much like what we must do when it comes to challenges to climate control, and racial and gender inequity, and policy discrimination against those in same-sex relationships, people with mental disorders, and those with physical disabilities, just for starters.  The truth is we didn’t always learn the right things from our parents (either due to imperfection or intentional brainwashing). But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn the lessons surrounding the consequences of what we do and how we think. As the old folks used to say: “The proof [really] is in the pudding.”

Lessons on Love, Multiculturalism and Community

 

Growing up in a family of six kids, sibling and/or family squabbles were bound to happen. When those particular instances inevitably arose, my parents would always say to us, “Act like you love your sister [or brother]!” (Similarly, either parent would use some variation of this statement with us kids as the situation would, from time-to-time, apply to one or the other of them that we had an issue with.) Upon reflection, as I have gotten older and a little wiser, I realize that this statement could, arguably, be construed in two different ways. One way would be to say “pretend, at least, that you are family and that you actually love one another!” Usually that tone, taken in the context of the heated circumstances leading up to the event, seized upon the need to remind us that family doesn’t hurt one another, because we really do love one another. And, yes, we were asked to call to remembrance the days before: when we and our ex-compatriot had been co-conspirators in creating joyous messes – as children will often do - that we needed to clean up together. Or shared secrets between us that no one else would know, could ever know (all things remaining constant, assuming the sibling “code” was left in-tact). This person that we now had a “beef” with was the object of our companionship, sibling or contemporary rivalries (which, usually, pushed us, and drove us to want to be a better version of ourselves), and if we took a moment to take a deep breath, we would admit that we couldn’t see ourselves ever living without them. I mean, how could we, without being deeply affected by the loss?

The other potential way that could be construed, if taken in a more literal sense, however, would be to interpret the statement in a very sanitized way. Meaning, “even if you don’t feel it, it is socially-acceptable and the right thing to do, to go through the motions of one who might actually “love” his or her sibling.”

Did you catch it? One version of the interpretation of this very, seemingly, straight-forward statement, suggests a history, a memory that is invoked in an effort to overshadow whatever emotion is rising at the present moment in which we might find ourselves. While the second context deals in hyperbole, and a person’s interpretation or visualization of an emotion – in this case, “love” – which he or she may or may not have actually experienced.

I’ll elaborate. If one thinks about it, it is much like young children singing old songs about lost loves and evoking with such practiced skill and inflection of voice emotions suggesting a deep knowledge beyond their years, such that one is almost convinced that they had lost the love of their life at the tender age of 9 – just five days before their 10^th birthday! Or, fast-forwarding to adulthood, it could explain how spouses that say they love their counterpart and would only do things that would edify them, turn around and later, in the heat of passion, in a moment, take that partner’s life – whether figuratively or literally. Somehow they feel justified that “in the moment” that they took their vows, they meant it, but later: not so much.

Today, “America” (summoning the manner in which the late comedian Bernie Mac would say it) is asked to wake up. To snap out of its lotus-flower induced stupor and to pay attention, for once, to what the events of the day have told us about ourselves and about each other. I would posit that what it has told us is that, in far too many cases, we have been asked to tolerate the existence of others, but we have not taken the time to create memories with one another that we could call upon to create a shared [positive] history. In fact, I know that many of my Caucasian and other ethnic friends are friends with me ONLY because of the interactions that were forced – otherwise we likely would never have gotten the chance to know one another. Had I not experienced the open classroom method of interaction that I had at an ethnically-diverse Louis Armstrong Middle School in Queens, NY, or had it not been for the cultural sensitivity program that all freshman had to go through the first 2 – 3 weeks of high school at Newtown H.S. in Elmhurst, NY, I might never have gotten to know and build the lasting friendships that I did with some of my classmates. But those friendships came through prolonged exposure to one another and daily “doing the work” of discovering that we could, in fact, work together on common goals (then called, “assignments”). With the experience of this exposure, came the realization that, although, at first glance, we may have appeared very different, at the end of the day, we actually had so very much in common. We had values and ideals that demonstrated the existence of a love and respect (we’ll get back to this word a little later on) for individuals in the family unit, a desire to take care of our family unit and/or community (in most cases), personal talents and skills that we wanted to explore, and a desire to do things that evoked a sense of joy within us. And these characteristics – similarities – crossed every ethnic culture you could imagine encountering. The difference, then, came in how we acted upon those sentiments – infused with mores and norms, guided by cultural contexts.

Back to my statement at the beginning about the argument or misunderstanding that precipitated that poignant statement being made by my mom (usually, although it was a message that both of my parents preached and lived … so that it was modeled for us: In most cases, the solution lay in the suggestion that we take a moment – this heated, intense, and emotion-filled moment in which we now found ourselves – to stop, and then consider the possibility that my sister or brother had acted out of a disconnect between us. Or a misunderstanding. Usually, forensically, I could almost pinpoint where a breakdown in communication might have occurred, or how I may have misinterpreted what was said or done (done that MANY times). (Alternatively, it was equally possible that an intermediary person, conveying a message, got it wrong.) Just that simple intervention, of taking us aside separately to quietly discuss with a neutral party how we got to where we were from our own perspective, helped to bring about a de-escalation of the situation and put us well on the road to reconciliation.

Perhaps the United States of America, as a whole, could do with a lesson in cultural understanding, instead of cultural tolerance. That way our claims of diversity could be a little deeper than the lip service that we have recently seen debunked before all the world. We put our hatred for one another on full display to the rest of the world and now, like a “messed up” family, we must go about the task of picking up the pieces of our shattered trusts and rebuilding relationships. It is important to note that even while we watched in horror as individuals acted out a lack of respect for our sacred ideals and way of life, and a lack of respect for human life – all that our nation was founded upon - at the same time, the waves of white, black and brown, and indigenous folks that stood together and continue to stand together in solidarity of our right to respect one another is evidence and proof positive that some of us want to understand instead of tolerate one another. For many of us, we’ve come to know one another personally. We’ve actually “get” that although we may go about it in different ways, we all share in common those rights that we hold so dear in our republic, because of our democratic form of government.

The intended end of a debate is actually supposed to be arriving at a common understanding between opposing viewpoints that will ultimately lead to resolution - at least “approaches” to solving an identified common problem. I am convinced that we’ve got some neutral folks who have crossed cultural barriers and who understand the spirit of and the art of debate, namely, the discipline and commitment to demonstrate how people can have differing points of view and still respect the other as they lay out their position. Let’s hope that some of those folks (you may know some in your neighborhoods, in your communities) have the courage to step up – in their individual spheres of influence – and hold the difficult conversations surrounding not merely compensation (it’s hard to put a dollar value of RESPECT that has not been given) but actual reconciliation - meaning, a commitment to intentionally move towards a better way of relating to one another,  just as my sibling and I would be been expected to do so after one of our “pow-wows.”

And that’s the thing:

Even while my formal [mostly, public] education taught diversity, the other part of my education came in the form of diversity that I saw in my neighborhood, as I played with children of different ethnicities on my block and on the playground, and in the church affiliation that I had, and, of course, the parenting that I received. The lesson being this: It still takes a village to raise a child. What we learn as a child, we will do as an adult. If we learn to objectify people of a certain race or class or gender, we will grow up to do that at each level of influence we attain. It is a chilling message, really, in light of the acts of hatred and inhumaneness that has been displayed on the vast world stage in recent months - and longer, as one can easily argue. But it is a narrative that we, as Americans, can and must change, because just as the tag-teamed intervention of my parents– one for my sibling and one for me – brought about de-escalation and strengthened our expectation to always be able to work through our differences going forward, improved relations or plainly-speaking “change”, does not happen immediately. It does, however, happen through deliberate, intentional and measured actions. And it happens over time. 

Time marked, beginning NOW.