This week we got up to a beautiful morning by the ocean and were greeted with this site. It reminds me of how growing up I never thought about the ocean and didn't see one until I was 17. Now the ocean draws me ever closer and although not possessed with an abundance of water signs, it is where I know feel at home. What happens to us when we change for better or worse?
Hopefully being truly human is not taking yourself as the arbiter of all truth and embracing change when you see it to be productive or right. When Emmet Fox wrote The Sermon on the Mount in the early 1950's he defined being righteous as doing the right thing and I have always put that at the top of my business practice. But this is not about business as much as the struggle sometimes to change so let me give two examples of hard change for me.
I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's in a fundamentalist extreme state of religion. I also grew up when racial prejudice was an accepted practice in Oklahoma. The Jim Crow laws had been superseded by "separate but equal" de facto segregation. After all I was taught that as whites we were superior to African-Americans and so we shouldn't mingle in any way. The only concession to the boredom of an all white school was one Chinese-American family, that was it. Also in the church we were taught to constantly fear the Devil tempting us with homosexuality and of course those people were condemned to hell no matter what as were the Catholics. You just can't make this stuff up. So what changed?
On race it was when I went to George Washington University in DC in the 1960s. I worked for the US Senate while in college and some colleagues invited me to a party of other capitol workers. I didn't realize that almost everyone was African-American and college educated. For the first time I realized what they must have felt in the reverse. I also saw how intelligent these folks were and open to friendship with me. Much more happened in my life but the old ways started to drift away. One caveat, if you think that all prejudice is gone just by willing it you are wrong. For us older folks there can be times where it wants to emerge so you keep working on it.
On homosexuality, homophobia turned to acceptance once I got to know more about it and how it is nature versus nurture. I also started to lose friends and people I knew to a strange disease that didn't have a name but later became the HIV/AIDS that was rapidly spreading. I became involved in a fund raising group in honor of my lost friends and we created homes for singles and heterosexual couples who had contracted this scourge. Just like with racial prejudice it is not enough to just change your mind, being human also requires action for the betterment of society.
My Mother was my example of how change never stopped. Even at 95 she came to accept my lack of belief in religion and like me accepted that we are all equal given the opportunity to be, and even came around to the idea of gay marriage. At times like this I think of the wistful Jimmy Buffett song, A Pirate looks at 40. The only difference is that this pirate is looking at 70. I am not here to brag about my change, in fact I have felt shame in some of my old beliefs. I am still working on my hostility to religion which is more about my own experience rather that others experience. I also believe that being human means that truth only extends as far as your nose, and like being an Eskimo it only kinds it's real truth when we rub noses with others. Change should not be feared although that is a very human emotion also. Until the next change I vow to try to always maintain my tolerance, my compassion, and my love in spite of the evils of racism and bigotry we see today. I have been there and done that maybe not to the extent we see in the media but there all the same. I accept my change but i also accept my faults. After all, it is only human to do so.
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