Power Plays
We have moved. We now live in Kansas City, KS. So far I like this place. It has been described as 50 communities, 2 states, 1 city. I like the diversity of the place. It feels like home to me.
There seem to be a number of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds represented here, that feels like America to me.
As a child I lived in the north where racism was pretty covert, but very real. We then moved to the rural south where racism was overt and accepted. I remember walking into a 5 and 10 cent store with my mother and seeing a set of drinking foutains. One was marked white and one was marked colored. I started pulling on my mother’s hand insisting that I wanted to see what color the water was. She stopped me and told me that it was for colored people. I remember thinking that I did not understand why some people got a more colorful fountain than I could have. I look back on that incident now and realize that everything is about perspective. I did not know that it was about discrimination back then.
I look at the way we discriminate and I feel sad and angry. It stops us from being all that we can be and keeps us stuck in fear. Prejudice in all its in various forms is so wrong and yet we keep doing it over and over.
Moving to a place that seems to be more culturally divergent and accepting is something I like. I want to be a part of something growing and vital. That is one of the reasons I love this country. It is something wonderful and real. But it is under attack. Not from some small, beleagered, war-torn place like Iraq but from unchecked growth and greed. It is greed and the lust for power that has become the problem for this earth.