Aren’t we fortunate not to have a race problem in the Bitterroot? How many of us have had that thought since Dylann Roof joined a small group of black adults at a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, last week and then shot nine of them to death in the name of patriotism and racial purity?
But we do have a race problem here, you know. How many motor vehicles do you see per day with a Confederate flag bumper sticker? How many individual Native Americans and even whole tribes did our ancestors displace and massacre so we can live where we do? For historical and geographical reasons we are not a very diverse community. How many of us feel iffy about interacting with the few individuals here who look or act different from us?
And since racism is basically the same thing as homophobia, sexism, age-ism, etc. — all of them fear of apparent difference, fear of losing of “power” — what about all the bullying that apparently goes on in our schools, so that “different” kids drop out and are home-schooled, sometimes with indifferent success? Both bullies and bullied carry the scars into the rest of their lives.
And what about giving our young people (especially boys) guns for their 21st birthday or thereabouts? Is that supposed to mean they are men? or make them men? How well were your brain and your life working when you were twenty-one? What really makes a man? Or woman?
There’s no ultimate fix except caring about the individual people around us — all of them. One way to encourage that would be to give all young people the opportunity to earn money by going to a different part of the country for a year to help with one project or another that supports the local community and, therefore, the nation. That would be a way to help them learn what real patriotism is and learn some concrete skills instead of just letting them drift while they’re trying to figure out what adulthood is.
I’m for universal, optional, national service. If you are not familiar with ServiceNation, please consider looking into it: ServiceNation.org.
Mary Fahnestock-Thomas
Hamilton