Things I've Learned About Life And Race As An American (Before the NAACP - Tea Party dust-up)

~ None of us had a vote in choosing the parents that conceived us or the families that we were born into.

~ None of us arrived with knowledge and experience, but had to acquire them from everyday life.

~ Studying your own history, culture and heritage is not selfish.     

~ Positively supporting your own culture or heritage is not unpatriotic or treacherous or treasonous.

~ Studying other histories, cultures and heritage is not a burden; you may not become an expert but you won't remain clueless, either.

~ Education is a precious privilege that in America is granted from birth, and public school or private, I have an opportunity that does not exist everywhere in the world.

~ Life events can bring great trials and heartache at the hands of others, but also great comfort and support at the hands of others.

~ Ignoring a wrong to someone that doesn't look like me doesn't prevent that wrong or another wrong from happening to me; would I want to be ignored?

~ It is more effective to have a conversation about problems and wrongs than a deafening screaming match.

~ If I choose to isolate myself from other people of other cultures and heritages, I have chosen to build my own tower of ignorance.    

~ None of our skin colors rub off, taint the chairs or poison the swimming pools.

~ It's okay to ask questions about another race or ethnicity - how else will you learn the answer?                

                                              

~ Each of us has made mistakes along the road of life. Learning from those mistakes should be celebrated and not held against us.  

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                               

~ My cheese can get moved:                                                                                                  whether career, home, economics or politics - and yours can,too.    

~ I would rather learn to live in an era of change than to die in an era of stagnation and hatred.

                                                                                   

~ I don't choose my friends because of skin color, eye color, hair texture or ethnicity. I chose you because you have ideas, ideals and values that I have grown to respect, and because you bring something unique to the journey called life.
                                                                                                                                    

~ Sometimes the fifteen minutes of fame, the microphone and the television camera are focused on the wrong people. That does not diminish the rest of us. 

~ Every morning in kindergarten we recited The Golden Rule: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'    

~ 'Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.'                          -- Eleanor Roosevelt

~ "The measure of a man is what he does with power."
--Pittacus, one of the Seven Sages of Greece

~ Character is who you are and what you do when you think no one is watching or will ever find out.  It is who you are "in the dark". It is not who others think you are, but who you know you really are.
--David West, Inside Out Leadership Development, LLC

The Window Seat by Karen Caffee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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The Wait Is Over

 We've been waiting a long time for rain in California. A very, very long time that brought several years of firestorms and destruction of hillsides. The fires all have names and they all caused loss of life, serious injury and catastrophic damage.

Throughout America, there has been a long wait for new leadership. A long wait, through terrorist attacks, economic decline, job outsourcing and downsizing, political scandal and intrigue. Each crisis has a name and they caused some level of deprivation that affected many or all of us.

One year ago a new administration took office in Washington, D.C. Two days ago a week of storms descended upon California. The waits were over but the results are not all that we want. We have seen a year of economic surgeries that were supposed to reinvigorate the housing and job markets, and rein in excess on Wall Street. We have seen the attacks by pirates, kidnappings of our citizens overseas, actual and attempted attacks on our homeland.

No amount of wishing is going to change what's happened. The clock won't turn back and the bell won't be unrung. We have seen some of our worst fears and some of our pretty bad fears come to pass. We have a lot of issues and problems to deal with, and we'll likely have more before we're satisfied that we have the change we want. So are we going to continue to point fingers, shout out loud, talk trash and fan flames with rhetoric and rambling? Are we going to wrap ourselves around ourselves and only worry about the nose on our face and the faces in our houses? Are we going to wait for 'someone' to fix everything? Are we going to continue to travel on 'More of the Same Road'?

I hope not. I hope that we will inhale, exhale and think about the criticisms that we want to level against the other party or the other side. Let's be real: if all of America's problems were solved by President Obama in the first twelve months of his administration, there would be murmurs of sorcery and calls for warlock commissions. The view from inside the job has to be decidedly different and a bit more realistic than when you're trying to get the job. You can't appoint only the people that agree with you (and he didn't want to), you don't get to select who sits in both houses of Congress (you can campaign for some, but no guarantee that they will win), and you don't get to turn out the lights and lock up the store for the night (even if it is a really nice store to live above). You get a 24/7/365 preoccupation that will test all of your skills and all of your patience. Remember the classic line from "Jaws"? 'Just when you think it's safe to go back in the water…' with the music building to a scary crescendo, and then came that shark that wouldn't die until the theater lights came up.

We have serious days ahead and we have serious issues to address as-a-nation. Sitting back doesn't work anymore for us as citizens. Who besides your immediate circle should know how you feel about the performance of your elected officials – the people who work for us? Answer: those same elected officials should hear how you feel from the time they take office until the time of the next election! You may or may not get the answer that you want, but your communication will remind them that you are paying attention to their performance. Just as your performance is evaluated by your boss or supervisor, elected representatives should know how their performance is rated by the people. But don't stop with communicating with those representatives: do something yourself to help make a situation better. Everyone has some skill to contribute to resolving problems. And here's a novel but not original thought: you can team up with people of different parties and positions to work for a common cause. The exchange of ideas leads to solutions faster than the exchange of insults. Don't quit if you don't prevail with your point or idea, keep expressing your ideas. Talking to each other is what's most important, not the size of the words or the smoothness of the speech. Dialogue is what counts and you have to be in the conversation to be in the game.

A very wise man named Stan Bush put it like this: "…It's really not about 'them'. It's about us…'We the people'. If WE continue to do what we've done for 200+ years, we will continue to be divided. We must not let parties and race (be) the deciding factor. After all, when the guy hits the winning home run in the World Series, or scores the winning TD in the Super Bowl…Nobody on the winning team really cares about his race or politics. They are just glad that their team won. We need a team."

Healthcare  for our citizens is still too important to ignore. The economy and workforce, housing and homelessness, education and national security have to be addressed. The team roster isn't closed, but the clock is ticking. Game on!