Reply #216: The tears we shed when we watch that movie

[truedelphi]

Are for all of the pain and the lessons we have had to experience or watch others experience.

I never ever understood what it meant to be an American until one dy I sat inside a Danish cafeteria. I was just passing through that country with two friends. I would never see that cafeteria again.

But I felt oddly out of place. At first I didn't know why. Then I realized that with my NOT BLOND HAIR, and my NOT BLUE yeyes, I stood out like a sore thumb.

Everyone but me and my friends sat in that cafeteria looking pretty much like each other. I mean occasionally one person or another stood out slightly: somewhat too heavy set or somewhat too skinny. or way too tall or way too short. But the hair coloring was identical, the eye color was identical. Three hundred people and they pretty much looked the same. Basically cousins.

I felt so alien I cannot decribe it. And I was a white person sitting with a bunch of other white people. I cannot imagine how it would have been if I was totally different - Chinese or Black, American Indian, Muslim from Dubai. (Of course maybe a black person from the uSA would have been so familiar with the alien feeling I was experiencing that it wouldn't have registered for them.)

I was suddenly struck by a new found love and respect for my country. I believe that we all, as both individuals and as a people, choose our reality. And the most racist person in this country, on some level they are struggling with the concept of racism. Whereas simply by being born in Denmark they could have escaped that concept as an life issue.

America is a melting pot. Sit inside any cafeteria in any big city and you can see it.
Yes prejudice is alive and well. And every time I watch To Kill a Mockingbird i get the shivers when the people in the balconey nudgeing Atticus' daughter to rise to her feet. But we're all working on it. Some more than others.

And McCain is simply a bitter old man. He lost his prime years to a tiger cage.
Chances are good he will lose this election to Barack Obama.

It must rankle his heart and his soul, but I am not sure it is prejudice. I think it is the feeling of someone who has stayed in the political world months if not years before he should have gotten out. And so he cannot bear to see the young lion that is becoming the alpha male. While McCain retires to chew over a few odd bones and wonder why he didn't get his chance years earlier.