I saw the look of fear in her eyes. First that he slipped
under the water, and then again as she looked around to see who had possibly
seen her quick moment of maternal failure. As she yanked him upright in the
water I told her, “My son just took a dunk too. They’ll both be fine though.”
She adjusted the hijab on her head and her now wet clothes
as she nodded. I offered her a smile and her apprehension- whether towards me
as a stranger or her sudden heart failure at her son slipping in the water-
seemed to subside. She moved her son back closer to the edge of the pool so she
could sit on the ledge like I was.
“How old is he?” I asked.
“Fifteen months,” she said in perfect English.
“Mine turns a year old in a few days. First boy. They’re a
little more of a handful than girls I’m finding,” I said. She nodded, still
seeming hesitant at my attempt for conversation.
Her son splashed in the water near mine. My son mirrored her
son’s motions and before long the two were slapping at the water, giggling at
the constant spray of water. “If only adults interacted like children,” I
thought. I looked around the crowded
water park. As the children played they would make new friends. I could see my
daughter going up and down the little kiddie slide a few feet away with a
little girl she just met. She’d run up to me in a bit like she usually does and
tell me how she made a new friend. That’s the way children played. They didn’t
know religious, racial, or economic differences. They just saw someone fun that
was willing to interact with them. But in the adult world we not only saw the
differences but as the recent political climate has shown we attack those
differences, thinking one made someone better than another. If it wasn’t our
own judgments and bias preventing us from opening a conversation about our
differences it was the judgments and bias we felt passed against us.
I grew up in the middle of white middle class America. I
left home at 23 on a search for America. I wanted to see her sights, understand
her history better, explore her culture, and meet more of her people. Even
though I experienced my first culture shock on the outskirts of Washington D.C.
where I found myself surrounded by people of varied races, religion, and
languages, I’d learn to see her differently everywhere.
But as much as I came to appreciate and see the beauty in
her diversity I also came to see how divided we were as a country in who we all
saw America as. Some saw Syrian refugees as a threat to our national security;
whereas, I saw the boy that sat in the back of my American Lit class that wrote
a beautiful story about leaving Syria at the age of five to come to America for
better opportunities. Whereas some saw Muslims as terrorist, I saw the boy that
stayed after class almost every day to put up the chairs around my room after
all his classmates left for the day and would tell me to have a nice evening or
weekend as he left. Some would see a
random black man walking on the street as a possible threat, but I saw the big
tall black kid in my class as one of the biggest gentle giants I had ever
encountered in my life who loved to talk to and tease my daughter when we
attended his wrestling matches. Some saw the Hispanic immigrant as the one
taking what was “his” or “hers”, but I
saw the immigrant girl in my class as one of the hardest workers I’d ever
taught as she valued her education as an opportunity to make herself a better
life. Some saw the poor kid on free and reduced meals as someone expecting a
handout, but I saw someone that had been dealt a crappy hand out of her control
that approached each day with a hope and positivity so many others dealt more lacked.
Some saw the homosexual boy as just acting out for attention, but I saw a boy
that just wanted love and acceptance like everyone else.
I first truly found America in those diversified classrooms
of America’s youth, but as I searched to understand and appreciate her better I
began to see her more. I started to see that she was everywhere as I traveled
back and forth between the East Coast and Midwest. She was there in the farmers
I saw working away on their fields across the plains of Ohio to Missouri in the
hot setting July sun. She was there in the way the wait staff greeted customers
with their southern hospitality in the mountains of Tennessee. I saw her in the big hopes and dreams of the
strangers I passed as we walked the streets of Hollywood. I saw her in the
people that made it their life’s work to revitalize their small downtowns or
their communities and schools. America wasn’t just a color of white or dark skin;
she wasn’t just a religion of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim; nor was she who she
was just because she was rich, middle class, or poor. Who America was wasn’t
based on a race, a religion, or a certain income level though it seemed we saw
her that way first. Rather she was a strong work ethic, she was hope, she was
community, and she was acceptance. She was all of us- working towards achieving
something the world missed. America’s hope was to achieve unity in our sense of
work ethic and compassion in a world too often divided by our differences.
When tragedy has stuck our nation over and over again, as
has been the case all too much recently, the heroes that stepped forward to
risk their own lives and offer help were of all races, religions, political
parties, and social classes. We all bleed red, and just as evil lurks in
humanity regardless of the labels placed upon us as people, the heroes are
cloaked in all labels of humanity too. It’s not skin color, political party,
money, or even our religion that separates good from evil but what lurks in our
hearts and our minds. The light and the darkness is there, hovering on the cusp
of who each of us can be, and though it may be easy for some to always choose
the light, our true American humanity shines through when we reach into the darkness
to help pull one another deeper into the light of hope.
I looked at the kids who made new friends as they played in
that water park in the middle of Wisconsin in the middle of this country that I
loved and hoped that maybe they would be the generation that could put the
division of our races, sexuality, and religion behind us and be the kind of
America she was always meant to be. Here in the hearts of our young is where
the hope and acceptance of what America was lived. They were not cloaked in their
skin color or their differences but in their hope for something better.
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