What I Can't Ignore When I Walk: Diversity

I have one of those "head in the clouds" dreamer personalities that would by nature blissfully ignore the practical realities of life to whatever degree possible. So it has become my choice of a pedestrian lifestyle in a city like Santa Monica that quite literally keeps me grounded in some of the harsher aspects of our present reality. Lately there have been three things in particular that I have recognized as impossible for me to ignore in my walking world. My next three blog entries will focus on each of those: 1) the Messiness and Beauty of Diversity, 2) the as-yet-unsolved problem in our society of Abuse of Power in our families, schools, churches and businesses and 3) the ongoing challenge of Change and Progress as people and planet collide.

The Messiness and Beauty of Diversity is one of those things I find it increasingly difficult to ignore in my walking. I could have chosen to conduct my social experiment of a pedestrian lifestyle anywhere--including in the homogenous town of 300 in rural Michigan where I grew up. In that area the people all have the same color of skin and most even hail from the same part of Europe. You will hear no language other than English spoken there or the views of more than one political party expressed. The "look" is basically the same across the board as are the levels of education and economic status. And one faith is held almost exclusively by the residents, with only two of the numerous variations of that faith even significantly represented.

In sharp contrast, I cannot walk 6 blocks in Santa Monica along my typical paths without hearing the music of 2-3 languages, seeing a rainbow of skin colors and types of attire, or encountering those with dramatically different faiths and political views from one another. People without homes and incomes live along the pathways of the luxury hotels and condos so that I am brought face-to-face daily with both economic extremes. There is little about either the messiness or the beauty of diversity that I can ignore or hide from in my chosen lifestyle.

But for me it requires being a walker in this coastal city which deposits the world at my doorstep. Just living here--diverse though the city is--would not have automatically exposed me to that diversity. Walking everywhere is what has allowed me to begin to see things whole. Just as I could have cloistered myself away somewhere in a world of sameness like the rural town that gave birth to me or the "wealthy, white, suburbanite" culture I spent years of my adult life dying a slow death in, I could choose to avoid diversity in an urban setting as well. I could drive from parking structure to parking structure in a cocoon of a car and choose isolated groups to participate in and never learn either the lessons the beauty of diversity teaches me on a daily basis or ask myself the hard questions about the messes it creates.

When we cluster by race or by creed, by country of origin or by age, by social status or any other demographic, we lose the capacity to see things whole. If our "kind" is all we are ever exposed to--in any category--we begin to adopt the traits of only one face of humanity, without even realizing that it is happening. If we are not intergenerational, for example, we lose either the wonder of childhood or the vitality and reform of youth or the power and productivity of the peak years or the wisdom and patience that only life experience can bring. Whatever age group we isolate ourselves from is where we are losing out. If we do not integrate races, we lose out on the general traits each is known for and become lopsided and less than whole. If we are too afraid to expose ourselves to differing views from our own in faith or politics, we never refine and balance our own thinking. And if we choose to ignore either of the extremes of the socio-economic spectrum, we can easily hide from some very hard questions that need to be asked.

But it's messy to live that way. Every day in my walking I see some of the conflict that putting diversity together brings. The rich resent the poor for messing up their playgrounds and landscapes and the poor resent the rich for not finding better ways to share the whole. The races and cultures each wish the others would be more like them instead of learning from each. The young mistakenly think they know everything about life already before living it, and the old think there is nothing of the unseasoned vitality of youth that could in any way benefit the whole. It's rare to meet a person who prefaces any of his or her political or religious views with, "I realize I could be wrong, but..."

These are broad generalizations about the conflict diversity brings, but I watch them play themselves out as I walk on a daily basis. It's enough material for many books on the topic. But this blog is not the place for all of that and is mostly about a quest for learning to see things whole. Most days I simply wish there were a way to pick myself and everyone else up above the earth to look down on the situation and see how it looks from a distance. Then perhaps we would see how truly beautiful diversity is. How much it adds to life. And how complicated we make our own walks by fighting or ignoring that diversity instead of welcoming it, learning from it and eventually even embracing it--till the richness of the tapestry it creates is so stimulating that we can't imagine living any other way. Perhaps when that day comes we'll venture far enough outside the cocoons of comfort we create for ourselves to go out walking--with and among and alongside people who don't look or act or think much like we do.