Crash. Crash. Crash.
Dozens -sometimes hundreds – of time a day, I crash into people. At work. Where I volunteer. With friends and family.
Yes. Even with friends and family. With people I know and like. How does it happen?
It’s bound to happen. Our cultures are different. Even my siblings, who have the same parents I have, have developed cultures very different from mine. We cover the socioeconomic spectrum, from working poor to upper middle class. We cover the educational spectrum, from GED to master’s degree. We work in the trades, in retail, in the classroom.
Growing up, we shared a common culture. Dad was a teacher and guidance counselor, Mom mostly a stay-at-home mom with part-time jobs here and there. It was a strictly Catholic home where education was valued.
As we developed our own friends and outside interests, these modified our natal culture. Now when we get together, we have common ground in that early culture. It’s something we still share. But we bring with us all those other cultures we’ve collided with.
“Culture” here means more than the Sicilian-German culture we inherited through our parents – which was clash enough it itself: the stoic, reserved German with the sometimes volatile Sicilian. “Culture” also means the way we see, think about, talk about ourselves and the world. That’s been shaped by education, work experience, spouses and significant others, friends. Different factors have shaped each of the seven of us, and sometimes they collide.
If this is true in one family, it’s no wonder there’s so much conflict in neighborhoods and nation. We see the world automatically from our own place in it – and everything that doesn’t look like us seems foreign.
But we can be more than mere tourists in other peoples’ worlds, gawking and pointing at that which seems “other.” Like sensitive guests in another’s country, we can look and listen before we open our mouths, let alone act. We can choose, however briefly, to immerse ourselves in the cultures around us.
As any sensitive traveler knows, it’s hard work to put aside your own language and a worldview that measures everything by “the way we do it.” But it can be done. It must be done.
Or…
Crash. Crash. Crash. Is that the way we want to live?