People Are People

 

 Note: I don't know who wrote the comment for August, but it didn't make any sense. The comment was about being left-handed, and that somehow being a bad thing. I am proudly left-handed and it hasn't caused me any undue problems. In fact, I feel that it has made me better at problem-solving. However, the August post had nothing to do with handedness.  

 

“People are people, so why should it be you and I should get along so awfully…”

This Depeche Mode song has resonated with me since the first time I heard it in 1984.

I am a contemporary of Ruby Bridges. She is a year older than I. I admire her and her family, and am deeply sorry for the difficulties and outright horrors she experienced in school.

Even though she didn’t entirely believe it or live it, my mother taught me that you shouldn’t judge people based on race, religion, gender, ethnic background or, by my own extension, sexual orientation.

I know she didn’t live it. Every time I pointed out something my parents allowed my older brothers to do that they didn’t let me do, I was told, “That’s different; they’re boys.” It was never that they were older. All you had to do to qualify was to be a boy.

I assume she wanted me to be better. Whether or not she realized she had her own set of prejudices, despite what she tried to teach me, I don’t know. Perhaps she assumed that, just living life, I’d pick up the same prejudices she had somewhere along the line. I didn’t. I took to heart what she taught me. And I hated the “Do as I say, not as I do,” philosophy.

Of course, it’s all very well, coming from a lily-white neighborhood, where everyone on my block attended either the Catholic church or the Methodist one on Sundays to say, “Don’t be prejudiced,” or “I’m not prejudiced.” The idea is never tested; it’s only a theory.

My mother’s first-generation Scotts-Irish mother was Protestant, but since she had married someone who was a first generation but of Irish Catholic descent, part of the marriage agreement was to raise the children Catholic. That particular grandmother (I never knew her; she died the same year my parents married) did an excellent job of keeping her promise, and even had a good friend who was a priest. Granted she was Episcopalian, which some people jokingly refer to as “Catholic lite,” (no offense intended to any faith), which probably made things a little easier, given the similarities of the two faiths. (I’ve been both.)

When my grandmother was on her deathbed, her priest friend asked her if she wanted to convert. She did not, or at least she didn’t think it was honest to do so on one’s deathbed, considering she’d lived her life in a different faith.

I attended the local Catholic school. Two tests of what my mother said she wanted for me happened there.

In the first instance, I became a rebel at six by refusing to believe what the nun who taught our first grade class – impressionable 5 ½ to 7 year olds – told us in Religion class. According to her, only Catholics could go to heaven.

First of all, there were the tales of my Protestant grandmother, whom everyone said was a saintly woman. Even her priest friend said he wished he was as sure of his place in heaven as she was of hers.

Second, I could not believe in a God who created an entire planet of people, most of whom would be relegated to eternal damnation. It simply made no sense.

Fortunately, several years later, when someone in my class asked a question of a visitor to our class about why someone would be another religion when they knew it meant they would spend eternity in hell, the teacher was so upset and embarrassed by the question, especially since the guest in our class was of a different faith, that she told him he was wrong, and where did he ever get such an uninformed idea? The entire class proceeded to tell her that we had been taught that very thing by Sister Attila the Nun in first grade.

The teacher quickly, with all due apology, escorted our guest out of the room. After lunch, one of the parish priests came for a visit to disabuse us of such a notion. He told us that the church never taught that. So, I was back on good terms with God after that.

Two years after that first grade teaching, when the Civil Rights movement was getting into full swing – shortly before the JFK assassination – we had our first black family attend our school. There were three boys. One was in first grade, one in second, and one in my third grade class.

My third grade teacher thought nothing of doing what is now called peer teaching, but which had no name at the time. I was in the first reading group. Until that year, we only had three reading groups. But that year we had a fourth. It consisted of three or four boys, one of whom was our new black student.

Another student and I were assigned to help the fourth group with their English assignment, since the teacher couldn’t quite get through to them.

I had two of the boys, a boy who disliked me as much as I disliked him, and our new student. The first boy stood as far away from me as possible, and at one point said he understood the points of the grammar lesson, and returned to his seat. I continued to work with the new boy, and suddenly I saw his face brighten as he actually finally understood what I’d been trying to teach him. I was glad.

He looked at me and said, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you!”

My reply was, “Well, I don’t think my parents will let me marry you.”

Stop right there. It isn’t what you think. Yes, it was prejudice – my parents’ – but not because he was black. I couldn’t imagine my parents allowing me to marry anyone from the fourth reading group!

I only learned that my parents expected me to pick up their prejudices several years later. When I was 12 or 13, the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner premiered. The film ratings had only just started, and that film had an R rating, so none of us was old enough to see it. We were also too young to be allowed to date. However, my teacher that year used dating and that film as a pretext to gauge racial prejudice in our class.

She explained the premise of the film, and then asked would we date someone of another race. Most of my classmates who answered the question gave what I considered the lame excuse, “Well, I would, but my parents wouldn’t let me.” They wanted to sound aligned with the times (1967), I suppose. I don’t recall anyone saying they wouldn’t, but I imagine there were at least one or two who felt that way.

I had finally had enough of what I considered bigotry hiding behind adults. I raised my hand and told the teacher my parents wouldn’t have a problem with it, and told her what my mother had taught me.

I was proud of myself when I came home and told my mother. She was horrified. I couldn’t understand why. Her response was, “What will their parents think of us?”

Well, who cares? I thought what my mother had taught me was more aligned with Christian teachings than bigotry. As far as I know, there were no repercussions.

The “Who cares?” attitude came from years of being told, when I was denied the opportunity to do what everyone else was doing, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump in after them?”

I was always – and probably still am – considered a dork. I took in the strays, the kids no one else wanted. I didn’t always necessarily want them, either, but I usually stood up for them against what others were saying or doing.

Case in point, in our final year of elementary school, a new set of twins, a boy and a girl, were coming to our class. They moved in next to a girl in our class I didn’t particularly like. The new girl would be in our class, and the boy would be in the other eighth grade.

Well, this mean girl came in one morning filled with venomy gossip about the new girl. She already disliked her. She proceeded to turn everyone against this as yet unmet student: she was fat, she smelled, she had bad breath, she stood too close when talking to people, she wasn’t very smart, etc. This mean girl wasn’t exactly a confection of perfection herself, and it just made me angry that the new girl wasn’t even given a chance.

So, when the new girl arrived and everyone avoided her like the plague, I introduced myself and chatted with her. I think she was so grateful that anyone gave her the time of day that, from that moment, she clung to me as a lifeline. It didn’t matter that what the mean girl had said was mostly true. It was too unkind to turn people against her before they met her.

She wasn’t my favorite person to be around, but she was far better than the petty, self-righteous classmates who lived to make fun of others.

By the time I reached university, I had a whole new set of people to form an alliance with.

University was a seismic shift from what my life had been up to that point. I lived in a dorm that was, at the time, an experiment: a co-ed dorm. When I mentioned to my parents that I’d signed up for a co-ed dorm, their reaction was, “Oh, that’s nice.” The rest of my relatives were somewhat less than enthusiastic about the idea, immediately assuming sex and drugs and rock-n-roll.

“Your parents are letting you live in a co-ed dorm?!” (I was 18.)

“Well, I come from a co-ed family,” was my usual response. (I come from a very sarcastic family.)

Not satisfied with the fact that I wasn’t embarrassed by their questioning, my relatives and others would often try to drive their intention to embarrass me home further.

“I understand there’s a lot of sex going on in the co-ed dorms.”

That got old fast, along with asking if my roommate was a guy. The way the dorms were set up, either one floor was girls and one guys, or in the case of the L-shaped buildings, one wing was girls and one was guys. We had to have separate bathrooms, after all. It wasn’t Amsterdam.

So, I would explain that, no, people generally didn’t even date people from their own dorm, since that seemed almost like incest. That shocked them. I don't think they knew I knew that word.

One woman who wasn’t a relative decided to butt in on the discussion. She said she wouldn’t allow her daughter to live in a co-ed dorm. She lived in a no-visitation dorm, to which I countered, “I understand most of the women in those dorms are lesbians.”

While not very PC at all, I wanted to make a point that she was making unfounded judgements about me, my dorm, and what does or does not go on at college campuses.

I used to tell people I went from an all-girls’ Catholic school to a co-ed dorm. To everyone else, it seemed shocking. To me, it was simply a point of growth. But there was another point to be made. Of the first 10 people I met in college, half of them were gay.

It didn’t bother me. How could it? I grew up with cartoons starring Snagglepuss, the pink, theatrical lion, and Gene London hosting a children’s program.  My parents even watched Liberace on TV. Even though I didn’t understand as a child what the subtext was, I knew they were not like the people I knew at the time. They were different. And they were interesting.

One of the major interests of most college students is drinking. I attended college in Pennsylvania, where the drinking age is 21. At the time the drinking age in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia and Ohio, the states adjacent to Pennsylvania, was 18. Penn State, the university I attended was in the center of the state, or as the brochures stated, “Equally inconvenient to all parts of PA.” Going to a nearby state wasn’t a possibility just for a drink since they were all at least 4 hours from the school.

But, there was a gay bar in town.  Except on the weekends, they didn’t card (for the uninitiated, that’s requiring proof of age identification with photo). So, I met several people and made new friends with a population I hadn’t been acquainted with before. And unlike the whispered comments of the ignorant, they didn’t have horns, didn’t try to “convert” me.

I’m sure I asked embarrassing and ignorant questions in my effort to understand who they were and how they were somehow “different.” My new friends were patient and gracious. They answered my questions, referred me to novels I should read to gain a greater understanding. And they weren’t different. They were people just like me. They included me in their plans. They didn’t care what my sexual orientation was, and I didn’t care what theirs was. “People are people.”

One of my roommates got “burned” by trying to date someone from our dorm who was a friend of mine. I tried telling her he wasn’t her type, so she assumed I wanted to date him. I hadn’t been given permission to out him, so I simply tried to steer her in another direction. When she found out he was gay, she not only shunned him, she immediately asked any guy I introduced her to if he was gay. Totally rude. Needless to say, I had more problems with roommates than with anyone else I encountered in college.

I defended a gay couple in my dorm who roomed together and minded their own business. I didn’t know them well, but I believed they had a place at the table. A bigot, who must have been very insecure in his own sexuality came around with a petition to have them thrown out of the dorm simply for being who they were.

He made the mistake of knocking on my door, and he got an earful of what I thought of bigots. I also told him if he ever bothered me again, I’d report him.

Naturally, he tried to spread it about that my roommate and I (the aforementioned burned girl) were lesbians. Anyone in the dorm who actually knew either of us or cared had a good laugh about that one.

I have continued to take people as they are throughout my life. I like them or not based on who they are as people. I’ve met many people of different faiths, races, genders ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and political viewpoints who are simply lovely people, and just as many who aren’t. No one group holds the golden ring. People are people.

I may not have turned out quite the way my parents expected, but then, I never really did the things they expected me to do. And I didn't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge after my friends.