I used to joke that the place I grew up was populated by groups who fled New York City to get away from the people they hated, just to have all of those people end up in the same place because they were fleeing the people they hated, etcetera, etcetera – I know, not much of a joke. It was an incredibly diverse place, filled with every ethnic and religious group one could imagine. I don’t remember a lot of strife, though; people seemed to be able to put up with one another enough to keep the peace. Yes, there were silos and, yes, people tended to live in communities populated by enough of their own to keep them happy, but no – there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of hate or love. Just people doing what people do. Because humans are tribal; we like to be with people who are like us in most ways.
America has always been that kind of place, it seems. Most places are made up of one majority or another, and when that shifts, people tend to move. I remember when I first came to Berks County, PA, and I asked why all of the Jewish facilities were in the same part of town. The answer a professor at Albright College gave me was pretty shocking; he told me that some of the communities – including where I live now – didn’t allow Jews to live there, so they moved to the east side of Reading and built their synagogues and community center. Some house deeds even had clauses that forbade the sale of those homes to Jews, and the local hospital recruited from the armed forces and wouldn’t, the story goes, recruit Jewish doctors! That is ancient history, and much of that hate went away – or underground – when the truth about Hitler and the Nazis was made public. America – reluctantly – got into that war and helped destroy that hateful, evil regime.
Now, we have politicians openly and proudly being antisemitic, and many of them are running for office in the party I have voted for the most. Now, the mayor of New York City is showing his true colors, and others are following suit. I don’t want to live in a country where this is accepted; I want to live in a place where there is no place for hate. A place where people can practice the religion of their choice – a place where people can marry who they want, no matter the religion, gender, or race – a place that treats hatred as a mental illness. No, we won’t probably ever sit around in circles of love singing Kum Ba Yah, but maybe we will get back the grudging kind of acceptance and tolerance (wow, do I dislike that word) that I experienced as a kid and never thought I would miss. We don’t all have to like each other, but America should be a place where hateful words and behavior are put in their place, not extolled as virtues. This should be a place where hate is demonized, not diversity. That shouldn’t be too hard, should it?
Prayer – Holy God, we are all the same under the skin, made by You as beautiful creations. Help us to see that in one another. Amen.
Today’s art is was created by every student at Eberwhite Elementary (Ann Arbor, MI) helped to create this beautiful mural. In their regular classroom students read Sister Anne’s Hands or These Hands and talked about what acceptance means to them. Then each class came up with a sentence they liked best about what acceptance means to them to write on the middle part of the mural. In art class each student traced their hand and designed it to represent themself with symbols, color, line, and pattern. After cutting out their hands 5th graders helped to arrange them on the wall.