Day 18: Sit next to me

A couple of years ago someone tweeted the terrifying dystopian future you see above. Makes you shudder, right? Or wrong. I hope wrong or you're probably reading the wrong blog.

I'm not giving away any secrets if I tell you I am a proud, life-long liberal, and that future up there, that makes this small-town girl from rural Iowa giddy with possibilities. Imagine the conversation those two might have if one of them didn't have her face in her phone. Imagine the stories they might tell each other. The common ground they might find. I want to eavesdrop. Hell, I want to join in. Or maybe they'd just talk about the weather, because .... people are just people. Neither a wig nor a burka makes them anything other than human.

Unfortunately a lot people are terrified of people who are different from them. They've been fed a load of xenophobic horseshit to keep them fearful and under control and guarantees they will direct their anger at someone other than the ultra-rich sons of bitches who are the real problem in this country.

I got messages like that too as I was growing up, but it was the 60's and then the 70's, and I wasn't buying it. I was suspicious of sexism and racism and all the many other -ism's, much to my dad's dismay. Let's just say we did a lot of pounding on the kitchen table and never resolved our differences before he died when I was 24 and he was 46.

I lived in a town where the one time a black family (I have no idea where they came from) showed up at the public swimming pool, all the parents hurried up there and got their kids out. I wasn't at the pool that day, but word spread fast that there was a family of (insert any offensive racist name you know here) were in the swimming pool. I jumped on my bike and headed for the pool so I could swim with the black children so they wouldn't be alone in the pool. So I could join the Civil Rights Movement. They were gone and the pool was empty by the time I got there. I didn't get to make up for the cruelty of some of my neighbors. I was naive enough then to think that was possible.

I don't mean to sound like I never got out of that small town. My family did go on vacations to Yellowstone, Colorado, and Michigan. My dad liked to drive the back roads, so as we passed through South Dakota we sometimes drove through Indian reservations, as they were called at the time. I'm not going to repeat what my dad said about the Native Americans who lived on the reservations. The poverty there was obviously even worse than where I came from, but I didn't believe it was for the reasons my dad spouted. Needless to say, we didn't stop and get acquainted. Not that the people whose homes we were driving past were eager to meet us. They wished, and still wish, my ancestors had stayed in Europe. Rightly so.

When I left home at age 17, I moved to Iowa City and later a little ways north to Cedar Rapids. I got jobs working as a bartender. Now maybe I could meet some people who didn't look just like me.

The guy who trained me to tend bar at a Ramada Inn in Iowa City, Michael St. John, was from Mexico. He didn't call himself a Mexican though. He said he was an Indian, and he was proud of his heritage. I loved his stories about home. He taught me how to make a classic Margarita and he got a lot of middle-aged men laid in those motel rooms. He would put one foot up on a chair, strum his guitar, and serenade their wives with love songs while they swooned. When he sang "Please Release Me" you'd have thought Elvis himself was trying to woo his way into their big white cotton panties. They dripped. I was not naive though. I  knew as I stood behind the bar and poured drinks while he raked in the tips that he wouldn't dare walk up to one of those women under any other circumstances and flirt with her. He was only safe so long as he had his hands on that guitar.

A couple of years later when I was tending bar in a disco in Cedar Rapids, I met someone much like the transgender woman in the photo, a performer who called herself Bovine LeSwine. She told me how the saleswomen in the shoe department at JC Penney were openly rude to her, and wouldn't let her try on heels, even though she had money to buy them. And one night after the disco closed, I cleaned up her face and gave her ice in a towel after some guys jumped her after her show at another bar and beat her up. It was pretty bad, but we didn't call the police. I already knew it wasn't cool to be different; I learned it wasn't safe either.

I also learned not to take tips from the Arab students (male, of course), because they thought they were buying me with their tips, and they got pretty angry when they found out I was married and a tip was just a tip. A couple of those men were frighteningly persistent and made me glad for hefty doormen.

For a while, I worked for two Lebanese brothers who owned another popular disco, and I loved it when they took me home for dinner. Their mother didn't speak much English, but her food was delicious. And different from anything I'd ever eaten. Mothers like her are universal. I'm one now myself.

I think my dad would have liked it if I'd learned to be suspicious of people from other countries, of different races, after I left home, but that didn't happen. Quite the opposite. These few experiences only made me want more diversity. I still lived in a fairly monotonous, I mean homogeneous, world while I was in Iowa. I knew there was more out there.

I finally got out of Iowa when the Air Force sent LtColEx to Sacramento. I will never forget my first trip to the zoo. People from all over the world, speaking many languages, wearing clothing of every kind, crowded together like the city of Babel to see the animals. It was amazing! I went back over and over the year we lived there, and not so much to see the animals. In fact, I couldn't tell you anything at all about the animals now. I often just sat on a bench and watched and listened to the people, marveling at the array of cultures.

I'm not going to go through my whole long life since I left Iowa and tell you about everybody I've met who was different from me. Even I don't write blog posts that long. But I will tell you I haven't lost my desire to connect with people who come from different life experiences from mine. I've gone out of my way to meet people who are different from me in various ways. Maybe it's because I'm a writer. Or maybe I'm a writer because I'm fascinated by people's stories and backgrounds, their cultures and how we are different and the same.

Unless you too grew up pre-internet in a small town in Iowa (or any other state, I would imagine), you can't know how stultifying and stifling homogeneity can be. I think my craving for meeting people -- or hell, let's just start with one person -- from another race or another culture or another country started when I was born. My parents lost me one time at the Greyhound bus depot in Des Moines when I was two. They finally found me talking to some guy in a phone booth. OK, that sounds bad, like I was in a phone booth with a strange man who probably wasn't from Krypton. What I imagine happened though was that he was talking on the phone, and I, being two and not knowing that he wasn't talking to me, was talking to him about something that made no sense at all, if he were even paying attention. Let's just say I've never met a stranger, and my parents were never able to beat that out of me, although they did try.

Back to the photo at the top. It's an old one, but sadly I think it's still relevant. We're still getting the message that people who are different from us, whether it's a different culture or shade of skin or sexual orientation or political affiliation*, are suspect. Dangerous.** The enemy. They're trying to take something from us that we don't want to give.

I just don't want to live that way. I'm not sure why my dad wasn't able to indoctrinate me. Maybe it was the times, but I think it was something inherent in my nature. And I'm grateful for that. I consider it one of my superpowers. Sorry, Dad. If I believed in Heaven, I'd hope you found out there are a lot of people there, and they don't all look like you. I don't believe in Heaven (or Hell) though, so I'm glad I came with that lesson pre-learned here on Earth.


*I get stuck on that last one in the list, because political affiliation does make some people dangerous and I am afraid of some people because of their politics. So that's a complicated one, and it's probably another post, but I probably won't write it. I get enough politics on Facebook. But I will say, the only way I've found to cross a river of differences is to try to meet on a bridge and try to find common ground. Hard as that is. And as long as it's safe.

** I am not ignoring that there are dangerous people out there, and someone who is not dangerous for me might be dangerous for someone else. And vice versa.