On the first day of school I am always in awe and hyper-aware of the ways in which community can have a massive impact on your outlook—on the ways our interactions can make us. Sometimes break us. Mostly create our future selves, but only if we tend to our present ones. This morning, upon delivering my freshly minted third grader, I drove my toddler home to finish breakfast; we then went to get stamps and mail thank you notes and generally start our day. We were to go later to a city park, one of the many good ones in Athens, GA, and in the meantime to the YMCA, another staple of community formation, a place in which I have found people of vast differences in opinion somehow still in each other’s company. I thought as I do often of all the privileges we have, even what seem like the smallest ones: transport, education, food resources, housing. Things the majority of us take for granted.
Often I notice, especially in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, those souls awaiting the city bus I often take myself too, even now that I have a reliable car. I recall the year I spent in the city’s center, taking the bus where I needed to go, hauling bags of groceries down blocks to get to the bus stops and then to yank up my stairwell to my apartment. I recall the debts of my post-graduate school years, the humility I learned through these. I feel so much specifically for those who spent time patiently awaiting resources, like the bus at the bus stop—individuals, usually, but equally whole families, standing in the deep heat of a Southern August, lunch bag in hand or grocery and supply bags in tow, crossing major highways since few areas outside city center have sidewalks or even walkable roadsides. I wince at those quickly crossing a busy thoroughfare like Atlanta Highway to ensure catching the hourly bus on time. I want to stop my car and take some of them along to where they need to be, but I know I can’t, most practically because I don’t have room in my relatively small vehicle brimming with child car seats. But I put my mind to them, wish them a good day, swift passage, the same hopes I had when I waited at those bus stops.
I told you briefly that on our trip to Buffalo, NY we encountered a parking lot attendant complaining about hearing every other language than English, and his subtext was indeed Nativist—his entire manner showed this. I wanted, then, to look at him and asked him why he’d said that, but I didn’t, out of fear. In retrospect I even wished I’d started speaking Portuguese to confound him after he’d asked my husband where he was from and, satisfied that he’d said Georgia and looked like him, that he could reveal his opinions of the international visitors. But I can’t go back now. I can, in the future, perhaps pause long enough to consider what the right question would be to pose to someone who might make such a statement.
This is America—good and bad wrapped together, by perception. One person’s bad (or sense of it) isn’t really another’s, and privilege is real in a country obsessed more with attainment and merit than with compassion and connection. Daily I see some walls coming down in this respect, and some going right back up, but I await a time when more people will witness to the experience of each other, to the realness of human connection that often opens our eyes to what is necessary and good in a troubled world.