May 21, 2019
It’s
curious that the personal trait so many seem to hold most dear these days –
race – is the one they had zero role in choosing. No one selects it. No one creates it. One’s ability even to claim it is due to
decisions made wholly by another. And
yet… so many people cling to a haphazard (and Damocletian) mix of physical,
racial, and cultural identifiers as if any credit for their history, merit,
aptitude, or worth can somehow be ascribed to their own doing. It cannot.
We can’t
make that choice.
We simply
do not determine how we launch out of the gates and into this world. No one gives us a form to fill out ahead of
time or hands us a set of swatches from which to select, nor do we take some
test to see if we qualify for one racial makeup or the other. I did not choose to be a white American male. Such as any might be given, I can take zero
credit for it. The likelihood is higher,
seems to me, that I might have been born a Honduran boy, or maybe a small girl
in Tanzania. Or Asian,
statistically. But by some turn of
events here we are. After the better
portion of a half century here it strikes me as incongruous and odd, upon
reflection, that any of us should look down on one another for something which
is completely beyond one’s control. Our
fellow travelers in this life are making the best of who they are, where they
were born, how they were raised, the path on which they found themselves; and
honestly, the one you least expect might very well be standing there beside me
or you on the metro train, looking at us and quietly thanking heaven they
didn’t wind up like that. Probably are.
Give the
people around you a break. We’re all
stuck here with one another, trying to do the best we can, trying to raise our
families, trying to do a decent job of things, and generally wishing to be a
good neighbor. We don’t always look the
same or start out on the same path, so the best we can do is give one another a
helping hand or welcomed shoulder along the way.
That’s a
choice we can make.
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