Well, she could not really find the words. Finally she sort of burst out, "Can you imagine her in the White House?"
"Who, the veep?"
"No, the other, the..." (whispering, "She is black!").
I wanted to step back at least a foot but controlled myself; you have to be "nice" in these situations. "Yeah, she is black. You live in Hawai'i, surely you must be used to seeing people of all colors."
"But a black in the White House!"
I suggested the White House could be painted a bright shade of blue, with red trim.
Later, when I could not get that brief exchange out of my head, I thought perhaps our problem starts with always having to be "nice." One has to be nice with strangers, with people you don't know, not trust, are afraid of. We have become so estranged of each other that we feel we must be very careful not to offend another, so we make them feel good. Salesmen talk nice, they are taught that, even though they often aren't nice at all. They lie and cheat to get our business. And although we know it is a thin veneer, we so desperately want to believe she or he really is nice. So he sells us insurance we cannot afford or need, a crazily overvalued mortgage with payments we both know I cannot meet.
Then, always, someone says, But, there are wonderful people in the world who do wonderful things.
I don't doubt that for a minute. But what does that have to do with how I converse with the lady who is scared of a part black man. I would have liked to invite her to meet some black friends. After all, she tried to get me to come to her church. That time too, I was nice, and said I would think about it. She would be shocked if I told her what kind of spirituality I am deeply immersed in. Nothing subversive, I assure you. I strongly believe, as the native Americans believed, that we, humans, are just like other animals, part of Nature, part of All There Is. We are not better than other animals. I'm not even sure we're smarter. Oh sure, we can imagine and then make things that never were before - what does that say about us?
All it says we can imagine.
That, I have come to the conclusion, is the only real difference between humans and other animals. We share the same chemistry, very much the same DNA, we breathe the same air. Life eats Life. We do, animals do. We eat other animals to live. We eat plants, that eat sunlight and air, to process sunlight and air for us. The only difference that I can think of is that we can imagine things in our heads that never were. We can imagine mathematical formulae that cannot be (the square root of minus one, for instance). We can imagine a financial system that is spun from imaginary gold in imaginary space with illusionary values. We can imagine something we call democracy - we say it means one thing, but in fact it is something entirely different. We imagine good and bad that have little to do with my survival, but with ideas about how I and others "ought to" be.
Once, half my life time ago, I met and got to know, a small group of people who were primitive, surviving in the late middle 20th century. Not surviving very well, because their jungle was eaten up by a modern government that had grandiose plans to plant millions of acres in rubber trees and oil palms. There was something about these people that got to me when I first met them. Here were people who were truly human, as all of us were, once upon a time. Without lies, without nice, without worries, without government, without hierarchy (men were not better than, or owners of women), who knew themselves part of nature. It took me a while to figure out that what I felt was a connection with my own deepest roots. This is what humans were.
They were nomads, meaning they did not grow anything. They ate what grew around them, and when most of the food they liked was gone, or not ripe yet, they moved on a few miles further into the jungle. They did not own anything; after all they must carry to a new location what they cannot do without, which for them meant they must find what they need at the new location. Bamboo grows everywhere in the tropics, and it makes a wonderful little hut on stilts. Totally biodegradable, less than a year after the people have moved on, you could barely tell that there had been people living there. They knew nature intimately, of course. They knew it as well as their own bodies, because they and the plants, animals, trees around them were not different, simply different aspects of the same Whole. A whole that is One.
Once a little girl who was leading me to a gathering through paths only she saw clearly, said "You can't see the animals that are watching us, can you?" I admitted that I did not. "You will," she said. It took me many, many years, but now I do. The People did not "work," they spent their days in a dreamy walk, digging up a root here, plucking a ripe fruit there, singing little songs. They always left something of what they ate in the fork of a tree, or on a branch. "Maybe someone else is hungry," they said. And the someone could be an animal as well as a human. They dreamed, and learned from what fragments of dreams remained when they woke up.
And they could not lie. Just think: Nature cannot lie - ask anyone who has ever been at sea in a small boat; ask people who have experienced hurricanes, earthquakes. You cannot pretend the sun shines when it rains. The idea of saying something that was not true had never occurred to these gentle people; it would be literally unthinkable.
Of course they knew that I lived in another world; and I knew that they lived in their world. But for some reason we accepted each other exactly as we were. And so they changed my life. Their life, I knew, was real. Utterly, totally real. The kind of real all primitive, some indigenous, very poor people all over the world know. We, who live in so-called civilization, have forgotten what real is. We live an illusion, a bad dream, slipping into a nightmare.
"Who, the veep?"
"No, the other, the..." (whispering, "She is black!").
I wanted to step back at least a foot but controlled myself; you have to be "nice" in these situations. "Yeah, she is black. You live in Hawai'i, surely you must be used to seeing people of all colors."
I suggested the White House could be painted a bright shade of blue, with red trim.
Later, when I could not get that brief exchange out of my head, I thought perhaps our problem starts with always having to be "nice." One has to be nice with strangers, with people you don't know, not trust, are afraid of. We have become so estranged of each other that we feel we must be very careful not to offend another, so we make them feel good. Salesmen talk nice, they are taught that, even though they often aren't nice at all. They lie and cheat to get our business. And although we know it is a thin veneer, we so desperately want to believe she or he really is nice. So he sells us insurance we cannot afford or need, a crazily overvalued mortgage with payments we both know I cannot meet.
Then, always, someone says, But, there are wonderful people in the world who do wonderful things.
I don't doubt that for a minute. But what does that have to do with how I converse with the lady who is scared of a part black man. I would have liked to invite her to meet some black friends. After all, she tried to get me to come to her church. That time too, I was nice, and said I would think about it. She would be shocked if I told her what kind of spirituality I am deeply immersed in. Nothing subversive, I assure you. I strongly believe, as the native Americans believed, that we, humans, are just like other animals, part of Nature, part of All There Is. We are not better than other animals. I'm not even sure we're smarter. Oh sure, we can imagine and then make things that never were before - what does that say about us?
All it says we can imagine.
That, I have come to the conclusion, is the only real difference between humans and other animals. We share the same chemistry, very much the same DNA, we breathe the same air. Life eats Life. We do, animals do. We eat other animals to live. We eat plants, that eat sunlight and air, to process sunlight and air for us. The only difference that I can think of is that we can imagine things in our heads that never were. We can imagine mathematical formulae that cannot be (the square root of minus one, for instance). We can imagine a financial system that is spun from imaginary gold in imaginary space with illusionary values. We can imagine something we call democracy - we say it means one thing, but in fact it is something entirely different. We imagine good and bad that have little to do with my survival, but with ideas about how I and others "ought to" be.
Once, half my life time ago, I met and got to know, a small group of people who were primitive, surviving in the late middle 20th century. Not surviving very well, because their jungle was eaten up by a modern government that had grandiose plans to plant millions of acres in rubber trees and oil palms. There was something about these people that got to me when I first met them. Here were people who were truly human, as all of us were, once upon a time. Without lies, without nice, without worries, without government, without hierarchy (men were not better than, or owners of women), who knew themselves part of nature. It took me a while to figure out that what I felt was a connection with my own deepest roots. This is what humans were.
They were nomads, meaning they did not grow anything. They ate what grew around them, and when most of the food they liked was gone, or not ripe yet, they moved on a few miles further into the jungle. They did not own anything; after all they must carry to a new location what they cannot do without, which for them meant they must find what they need at the new location. Bamboo grows everywhere in the tropics, and it makes a wonderful little hut on stilts. Totally biodegradable, less than a year after the people have moved on, you could barely tell that there had been people living there. They knew nature intimately, of course. They knew it as well as their own bodies, because they and the plants, animals, trees around them were not different, simply different aspects of the same Whole. A whole that is One.
Once a little girl who was leading me to a gathering through paths only she saw clearly, said "You can't see the animals that are watching us, can you?" I admitted that I did not. "You will," she said. It took me many, many years, but now I do. The People did not "work," they spent their days in a dreamy walk, digging up a root here, plucking a ripe fruit there, singing little songs. They always left something of what they ate in the fork of a tree, or on a branch. "Maybe someone else is hungry," they said. And the someone could be an animal as well as a human. They dreamed, and learned from what fragments of dreams remained when they woke up.
And they could not lie. Just think: Nature cannot lie - ask anyone who has ever been at sea in a small boat; ask people who have experienced hurricanes, earthquakes. You cannot pretend the sun shines when it rains. The idea of saying something that was not true had never occurred to these gentle people; it would be literally unthinkable.
Of course they knew that I lived in another world; and I knew that they lived in their world. But for some reason we accepted each other exactly as we were. And so they changed my life. Their life, I knew, was real. Utterly, totally real. The kind of real all primitive, some indigenous, very poor people all over the world know. We, who live in so-called civilization, have forgotten what real is. We live an illusion, a bad dream, slipping into a nightmare.
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