On Earth

On Sunday Wade, Henry and I drove behind a car with a huge confederate flag on its bumper. I got the chills. I said “Baby let’s pass them, it is making me feel very nervous.” The guy driving wore a hat with a confederate flag on it, his hair hung out from his hat in chunks, his windows were down and his face was shiny from sweat. He stared at us the whole time we drove past to him. His eyes were blank but they told us his feelings. All the people in his car stared. The woman in the passenger seat was also very shiny, her hair was unbrushed and she was missing several teeth. Her skin was sun damaged but I thought that she might have once been pretty. Now she just looked tired and sad. Her shirt was covered in holes. I think they might have been arguing but they put aside their differences to stare and talk about us. They looked so unhappy. I wondered what they could possibly be thinking. Here we were, driving along, laughing and singing with Henry and there they are miserable, hot, angry, fighting, dirty, and yet somehow we are the ones worth staring at. The saddest part was the three kids in the backseat. Three children living in that environment. The hate in that house. The thought that someday children like that could be in a school with my son and that my son could hear that filth from them and that it will be about his Papa and what it will do to him…I had to stop thinking about it because it was breaking my heart. I can only hope that they are able to make up their own minds and find the truth in our humanity. That skin color tells you as much about a person as hair color or eye color; it does not say anything about the quality of a person. I grew up in a house where race was not a topic of conversation. It NEVER came up. My friends were of all races and I didn’t think about it for one second. Doria could draw the best record players and my teacher called her “The Record Lady” and she would dance while she erased the chalkboard which made everyone in the classroom fall over in laughter. Heidi’s Mom made the most amazing tamales and she had so many brothers and sisters that we could play kick ball in her backyard. Amber had special dance she did with her brothers and sisters and she wore beautiful feathers on her head and I sat in my seat wishing I knew how to make that music; that music that sent goose bumps all over my body and made me feel like crying and laughing at the same time. The beauty in diversity is one of the most glaringly obvious things to me and I am often baffled that anyone could see it otherwise. It’s like looking at the ocean or a sunset and somehow finding ugliness in it. It is like a foreign language that I can listen to over and over again but never understand. And the forwardness of it all….that someone would put something on their body, their clothes or their car, something so full of hate for a person that you do not even know, it blows my mind EVERY SINGLE TIME. I wonder if maybe that is why I am in this situation, like I have something to learn from it or like it is a test of the strength of my convictions. Most of the time I just wish that there was no test, that my family could just be and that people could just see us for who we are and who we are trying to be. That is the true measure of a person, not skin color or the job that they do but the way that they treat other people and the way that they spend their time here on Earth.