Time for a New Lesson

I’ve spent a large part of my sixty-three years (and counting) on the planet trying, and not always succeeding, in understanding my own behavior and motivation on everything from actively disliking almost all seafood to an irrational passion for the New York Yankees.

I’m wired the way I am because of heredity, environment, and life experiences. So are you. Good and bad, Sekt Oder Selters, we are each the way we are. Not better than one another and certainly not worse, but different. And those differences between us are a way to recognize each of us as unique.

Another is how much we have in common, despite our differences. Our biology is the same regardless of our religion or skin color or fondness for pistachio ice cream. With my apologies to Reggie Jackson, we are each in her/his own way more than able to be the straw that stirs the drink every day and any day.

I have no deeper insight than does anyone else on this as to what clicked the switch inside the head of that white young man in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. If I did, I’d have offered it by now and you wouldn’t be able to shut me up about it. But I have no words, and only sorrow without surcease because the firestorm of reaction we are experiencing is not the first and, more importantly will not be the last time.

I don’t know what I don’t know, but I do know this: It’s not guns, or flags, or skin color or left-handedness that’s the root of our national crisis. We are. 

If I'm arrogant and foolish enough to think I’m better than you because of (insert right here however many excuses masquerading as reasons as you’d like) WE have a problem and all the talk about anything else will NOT fix it.

In the midst of all the attempted conversations in large and small groups across this country in recent days, I found this article online and knew in the marrow of my bones that we still haven’t unlearned all the stupid stuff we need to if we are to move forward as one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. 

We’ve got to be carefully taught, starting today because tomorrow is too late. 

-bill kenny