Children are the best examples of diversity

Everyone, it seems, is concerned about diversity these days.

No minority actors are nominated for a prestigious award and everyone is up in arms. And they are probably right to be concerned.

However, diversity goes much deeper than skin color. We are all different under the skin and we are all the same. There is much which makes us unique and much which makes us the same. We know this but does it affect our thinking?

When I was an adolescent, mom tried to explain to me that it is not just OK to be different but being different is tremendous.

I didn't get the point. I wanted to be just like everyone else in my class and the thoughts of any of us being different -- horrors!

By the time I went to college I was thinking for myself and resisted the pressure to fit into the mold of my major course of study. The truth is, I was too busy finding out who I was and delighted when I discovered something new that I could do.

Today, I think my generation's brains must be tired. We want to pigeon hole people. That's an interesting term that comes from the old days when pieces of paper or envelopes were sorted into little boxes set in a wooden case. Many times mail was sorted that way. The act of sorting into those boxes came to be known as "pigeon holing."

Too many times we want to sort people and classify them instead of celebrating what makes them unique.

There are racists but there are also times when many of us broad minded, thinking people see a group of blacks (Negros? African-Americans? In my lifetime, that race has been known by various names of their own choosing) and we think, "I better get away from these people. I don't know what trouble they might be up to."

That happened to me last week in a McDonald's in Collinsville, Illinois. Then, as soon as the thought came into my mind, I was embarrassed by it. I didn't know those people. If they had been white, I would have probably smiled and thought, "They are having a good time. How nice!"

It's not just races. Think in terms of politics.

What do you think about Republicans? That they are hard-working and rich? Maybe you think of Watergate and other terms come to mind.

What comes to mind when you think about Democrats? That they are socialists? That they are blue collar middle class people? That they want to take your tax money and give it to people who don't want to work for a living or maybe you think in more positive terms, that the Democrats want to help people who cannot help themselves.

Now, think about your friends, people you respect. Are they all Democrats or are they all Republicans?

I just bet you have friends who do not fit your generalizations of Democrats or Republicans.

Children are the best illustrations of diversity.

It's amazing that adults often try to classify children in terms of other adults in the family.

"You're just like your father!" But the little boy isn't.

"You're just like your mother!" Want to bet?

One of the good things about our mobile society is that children are no longer judged by their families.

It used to be said, "Well, what do you expect? He's a Smith (or Jones of Phillips.)"

I am certainly not a perfect dad but one of the things my wife and I did right was to help our children discover who they were as individuals.

Oh, sure, we had our struggles over school. "You will do your homework!" Over friends. "Who are you going to be with? When will you be home? No, that is too late on a school night. Be home by …."

We took the kids to Sunday School and Church.

Now, we have children who have followed completely different paths but they are productive and appreciated members of society. They have their own families, and may I be struck by lightning if I try to pigeon hole our grandchildren. None of them will be "just like" their father or mother or their grandparents for that matter. 

Write on! It's the right thing to do for your family

Everyone needs to write.Not everyone will be the next famous writer. Not everyone will pass high school English but for your family's sake, you need to write.
It's important you tell your family, your children your grandchildren, about your life. It's important to them. If you don't want to write, try dictating stories that you remember into a recorder. Most cell phones have the ability to record sound and if you have a phone you don't mind talking into it, do you?
Today I visited in the home of a 90-year-old lady who recently made a very generous donation to a local non-profit group.
During the course of the interview (which I recorded, by the way) she told me she "can't write" but she is jotting down her memories for her grandchildren.
She retrieved a big plastic bag filled with various sizes of paper on which she had written many things that have happened over the years.
She plans to have her daughter type the information into a computer to save it for posterity.
What a wonderful idea!
Young reporters sometimes complain they don't have anything to write about.
"Close your eyes and open a phone book to any page," I tell them. "Put your finger down on the page and call that number."
If someone answers and will talk, I promise they will have at least one interesting, entertaining story to tell. Everyone has a story!
The lady's husband wrote a series of letters for his grandson, talking about how much different the boy's life will be from the grandfather who grew up during the Depression.
There was another gentleman in the room while I interviewed the lady. They were not related.
He told me he learned his father was adopted as a child. His mother could not afford to keep both he and his sister so she agreed to pay a family friend a small amount of money each year until she got back on her feet financially. It never happened and the boy eventually changed his name.
What a great story! I hope he records it in some form for his children and grandchildren.
While I was in the lady's home I tried to remember why her deceased husband was so familiar to me.
"You wrote about him when he died" she said. "You put his story on the front page of the newspaper."
I try to write about all the prominent people at their passing so that was no surprise.
"I have that front page ganging on the wall of my study," she said.
I was dumbfounded!
Then she led us down the hall to a bedroom converted into a study.
There, hanging on the wall, laminated to preserve it was the front page from a 2005 edition of our local paper.
It had been hanging there 10 years and I had no idea.
"You're a good writer," she said.
Relatively speaking, maybe.
It was the subject and the story that made her hang the front page of our paper on her wall.
Not long ago I found a letter my mom wrote her dad when I was first learning to set up. I couldn't talk but I laughed at everything my dad's mother said, mom wrote.
Just like my son!
I gave the letter to our son and he later texted me about it. I'm sure he appreciated that little bit of family history.
You don't have to be"a good writer. The fact that you are writing about family will be enough to make it special.

Nogood-niks set bad example for our children

OK. I'm over it. It's time to move on.
When the Colts lost to The Evil no good-nik Boris Badenov Patriots and we learned that the Pats balls were under inflated I was incensed.
The Pats perhaps didn't do it intentionally but suspicion indicates someone in the organization was responsible, so I went to social media and expressed my outrage.
"Boycott the Super Bowl," I said.
A few in that Twitter/Facebook court of no appeal agreed with me.
"Make a dent in that god of TV sports, the ratings," I said. "That is the only way to say we don't condone cheating." 

I doubt it made any difference. A half dozen or so people retweeted what I wrote. About 20 people read it. Many others expressed similar outrage but what is that against millions of Super Bowl fans?

I did see one story that indicated last year's Super Bowl ratings had dipped slightly from the year before and I wonder why.

If you watched the Super Bowl this year I hope you had a good time. Linda and I watched Episodes III and IV of "Star Wars" in protest of #deflategate. 
I really don't care if you watched the Super Bowl. But we should care about the message we send our kids. There has been a lot of illegal drug use in professional sports. In more than one instance, players have beaten women and committed other crimes.

What are we teaching our kids and grandchildren about making wrong choices? I don't mean what we say. What are they learning from our example?