From the Treetop

Quote of the Day: "A

Quote of the Day: "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." -- Saul Belloe.

I should warn you that this is long and rambling. Generally a brain dump <g>

Meryl Yourish has written a very thought-provoking piece on hatred, that also speaks of tolerance and understanding titled, "Yes, I am a Jew" - the title taken from Daniel Pearl's last words.

Elaine of Kalilily Time responded with an account of growing up Polish.

Both of these pieces inspired me to examine my own childhood environment, and to think about how the formations and foundations of childhood become so much a part of us, even if we rebel against them at some point.

I am 3/4 WASP. I'm white. My ethnic lineage is predominantly English, Irish and German with a dash of Scot, a pinch of Welsh/Cornish and a drop of Norwegian - so that covers the Anglo-Saxon part. But I'm not Protestant; I'm Catholic. I guess that makes me a WASC.

When I used to ask my mother what nationality we were, she'd usually answer, "American." To which I would respond, "That's not what I mean." I'd go on to talk about Italians or Swiss or French to explain that I meant background, ethnicity, cultural make-up. She would, then, tell me I was a mutt - a little of this, a little of that. I never found that a very satisfying answer.

I grew up in a very homogenized, plain vanilla environment. I don't ever remember seeing Blacks, Asians or Hispanics on the streets of my town. I went to parochial school from first grade to twelfth with children who were very much like me from a cultural perspective. And I always felt there was something missing.

I had friends who were fiercely Irish. Their father and mother were both either born in Ireland or were the children of immigrants. To them, St. Patrick's day was the most significant holiday and green was the only accepted color. Though about a quarter of my cultural heritage is Irish, I never felt much affinity with them. Looking at them through my child's eyes, they were uninteresting (no offense intended to those of you who are proudly Irish.<g>)

About the only thing that happened around our house on St. Patrick's day was an annual teasing contest between my father and my mother. My father, from whom I get the English blood, would put on a green tie. My mother, who lays claim to some Irish blood, would look at it scornfully and tell him that he was a "limey" and had no business wearing green on St. Patty's Day. My father would laugh and tell her, "On St. Patrick's Day everyone's Irish." And if my mother felt like making it, we had corned beef and cabbage.

Again as a child, I found the mostly English part of me boring. They had no interesting ethnic costume. No exotic national food. No national dances or music. And they spoke the same language as we did. Shallow, I know, but I was a child.

I guess my childhood was too close to the end of WW II to make much of the 25% German blood running through my veins. It was mentioned in passing but that was about it. We had neighbors who were from Germany, but I never felt any affiliation with Germans either.

I wanted to be Dutch. They had windmills and wooden shoes and cheese. I thought French would be interesting. Good food, berets and an interesting accent. I thought I might like being Swiss. Yodeling, dirndls, cheese and chocolate. I was fascinated by the Orient, so I thought it would be neat to be Japanese (loved the kimonos) or Chinese (again good food). But mostly growing up, I think I wanted to be Italian. There were a few Italians in my school. My aunt married an Italian. They certainly had great food. They had Venice and the Tarantella. I thought it would be good to be Italian.

Basically, I wanted to be something other than what I was. I longed for that ethnic connection, but I never considered the consequences of those ethnic connections.

My parents had both grown up in culturally diverse environments. Neither one of them held any prejudices that I noticed, so I didn't feel any myself. I did feel a strong attraction to anyone who was different from me. And I had a thirst for knowledge of these other cultures.

When I graduated from high school, I went on to the NY School of Interior Design. I loved going to school in NYC. I was in a state of sensory overload. I couldn't take it all in fast enough. At the same time, I went to work in an art gallery. The owners, two sisters and a brother, were Hungarian Jews. They had fled Hungary when the Germans invaded, then went to France, which didn't turn out to be the safe haven they'd hoped for.

They were fortunate though. They found very kind and very brave friends who hid them, when the Germans also invaded France. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. I had learned about the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in school, but it seemed some how distant and impersonal. It was numbers, dates and dry facts that really didn't penetrate or equate to real personal suffering.

Through the gallery owners, I learned how much it involved real people, real suffering. But I could not understand, and I began to ask why.

I went on from there to a job at a buying office in New York. The majority of the people working there, and in the fashion industry where I found myself a few years later, were Jewish. From them I learned of the bias against their people. And the persecutions and the hatred. I still couldn't understand it. "Why," I asked, constantly. I found few answers that made sense.

I grew up during the Fifties and the Sixties with all the racial issues in the news, but they didn't affect me. With the introspection and self-absorption of youth, I didn't quite understand the full impact of the hatred.

Even today, when I know better and I have seen and felt the evidence of hatred between ethnic groups, I don't understand it. How can you simply hate, with such ferocity, a whole group of people without knowing them, without meeting them as individual people?

Through the years, I've met Blacks, Jews, Asians, Arabs. Some I've liked, and others I haven't, but the reasons I liked or disliked them never had to do with what ethnic group they belonged to. It had to do with who they were as people. I see them, have always seen them as individual people. I find it difficult to understand how others can not only judge a person by what ethnic group they belong to, but hate them so vehemently when they don't even know them.

I expressed these thoughts to Meryl in an e-mail and she responded that they are taught to hate by their parents. While I know this to be true, I don't understand how any parent can teach an innocent child to hate.

Often it is not a conscious thing. I know that. The parents don't tell the child, "this group of people are bad," but they teach by example. Sadly though, far too often, parents do just that. They actually teach and encourage their children to hate whole groups of people. This totally confounds me. I really don't understand the roots of it or the reason for it.

I can understand disliking or maybe even hating an individual who has done something to hurt you grievously. But I don't understand how so much hatred builds up between ethnic groups and races.

On occasion, I've felt the hatred from some Blacks, who hate all whites. Now I understand the reasons for that hatred in the abstract. Whites were responsible for slavery and all the abominations that have taken place since, but I'm not responsible for that. Me personally. As an individual member of the human race, I've never treated a Black person any differently because of the color of their skin. Why send hatred in my direction?

My family never owned slaves. Most of my family seems to be tolerant and free from prejudicial thought. Yet we are white, and some will hate us for this. Some will hate us because their history has taught them to expect hatred in return. But others - especially those I've come to know, don't hate me. I hope some even like me, because they have come to know me as an individual as I have come to know them.

Since September 11, I've seen and felt the hatred the Arab world seems to feel for those of us living in the West - in the US in particular. Why? Because our cultures are different? Because our values are different? Why can't they just accept that there are differences in belief structure, culture and skin tones? Why can't we all just see each other as individual people? As fellow members of the human race?

I understand it at an intellectual level. I've studied the history, so I've learned all the so-called reasons for it. Some valid, perhaps - at the time - some not. But at a visceral, gut level, I really can't understand this lumping together of people, this stereotyping that seems to be the basis for all this hatred. It is simply outside my sphere of comprehension.