Hold hands and stick together

I wrote this more than a few years ago to be published in our paper. There was/is a lot of division among the people of our community and I wanted to have my say. Needless to say I never submitted it (I'm a great procrastinator). Instead of deleting it and sending into the netherworld of kilobytes, or is it gigabytes by now, I'm sharing it with you.

I read a Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts' article about his daughter starting high school. It made me think about a few things like have we really changed so much now that we are on the other end of the age spectrum. So with apologies to Mr Pitts I wrote the following probably leaning far too heavily on his words.

A key element in his article was a poster in the school hallway that said, "Thirty years from now it won't matter what shoes you wore, how your hair looked, or the jeans you bought. What will matter is what you learned and how you use it." (Which kind of reminds me of the book "All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten" by Robert Fulghum. I will follow up at the end of this with an excerpt from his book)

How true that saying is. If we had been told those very words back in our teen years we too surely would have rolled our eyes, shifted our weight to one leg, and folded our arms until the speaker of the phrase was finished.

Kids in school are mostly concerned with their hair, shoes, jeans, who they are seen speaking with and hang out with. Later in the mature years we look back at such misgivings with a smile recognizing how silly it was and thankful we have escaped from immature trappings. Well I wonder if we have.

We seem to have made excellent use of what we learned in school and life. But then sometimes I wonder if we all have really evolved from being concerned about how others see our physical presence. From what I've observed in my lifetime I think not.

I guess we can blame advertising and the corporate decision about what we should look like this year. After all the 'American Way' is to lay the blame on someone, anyone but our self. We can not be seen driving an old car, with the wrong hair style/cut, wearing the wrong coat in winter, with a person not from the "in crowd" in our car. Do we vote that way too?

We dare not say/write/post a message that we failed at this or that in life. We are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. We don't beat our kids. Nor would we admit to having a compulsive disorder like making sure our clothes were folded just so in the dresser drawer. There is nothing wrong with owning up to such problems in our lives and neither is it necessary to bring it up in our conversations.

My point is that we still try to present ourselves as 'just so' to everyone. Yes, the little cliques are still there although they have evolved somewhat haven't they? Did you stop to say hello and speak with that neighbor down the street...you know, that one you may have only nodded to once or twice over the last ten years you lived there. How do you select those you associate with?

We should circulate with people from all walks of life, all age groups across the financial spectrum. I say this because I think we may have forgotten our roots. Make that OUR ROOTS in all caps. Most of us were fortunate to have lived in a city and gone to a school that included people of many nationalities, races, religions, and all sort of economic backgrounds. What happened? Did you develop prejudices as you grew older or were those prejudices there all along only to come to the surface as you became more isolated from what you disliked?

Have we sold out? Did we turn plain vanilla? Do we deny OUR ROOTS? Or have we become the image Madison Avenue wants us to be? Is it like when we go to a class reunion some thirty, forty years later that we once again become as we were when we were teens...the good opinion of these people is the most important thing your life. Is it that just maybe you will fall short in matters of dress, deportment and general coolness? Is it that others are the barometer of your social acceptance or lack thereof and you so desperately want to be approved by them?

Have we managed to string enough heartbeats together to gain a different perspective. Did we travel through enough passages, and learn the truth of the cliché: Life's only constant is change. Will you find yourself at that class reunion in a room full of strangers wondering how they got so old while you stayed the same?

Have we really changed? Are we just older but not wiser? Do you accept yourself for what you are? Do you accept others for what they are?

I never could write worth a crap...just instructional manuals. I don't know if I was able to come across with what I meant to communicate to those of you that read this or not but like Popeye used to say, "I am what I am. I'm Popeye the sailor man."

Bye y'all and here is what I promised way way up at the top of this far too lengthy article:
From Robert Fulghum's book pages 4, 5 and 6:

-Share everything.
-Play fair.
-Don't hit people.
-Put things back where you found them.
-Clean up your own mess.
-Don't take things that aren't yours.
-Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
-Wash you hands before you eat. Flush.
-Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
-Live a balanced life--learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
-Take a nap every afternoon.
-When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
-Be aware of wonder.
-Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup--they all die. So do we.
-And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned--the biggest word of all--LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all--the whole world--had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are--when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.