Pittsburgh shooting reflects on shared shame of humans
The heinous slaughter of Jewish congregants in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, as horrid as it was, cannot be viewed as a “one off” event. It was an important and horrific example of an as-yet-unsolved issue faced by many of us upright bi-peds, or homo sapiens. We are all members of a multitude of races, societies and religions who have not yet learned how to put aside such aspects of life when it comes to caring about one another.
Even in this still-new 21st century, we continue to organize ourselves in a manner consonant with a “tribal mentality.” Mankind has not yet mastered the basic issue of open acculturation and acceptance of all humans. We have failed to educate our children to see all homo sapiens for what they all are at heart. That is, “... in the crucial aspects of being.”
I must say that in the context of viewing society as a whole, I was blessed to be born to and raised in Ashley County, Ark., by a bootlegger whose clients were mostly black. In fact, as a small child my best friend, with whom I played on most afternoons after school, was the son of the black lady who was my dad’s chief aide. That fine lady was Erma Reynolds, who was born in the 1890s and who died in the year 2001, after having lived in three separate centuries.
Her son and my friend “Buddy’s” actual name is George W. Reynolds, who, after college and military service in Korea, became a minister. He recently completed 50 years of service as senior pastor of the Ellison Chapel A.M.E. Church in Milwaukee.
Buddy and I are still, all of these years later, “best friends” and I could not be more proud of the man he turned out to be. He and I were, and are, very different, yet we have never thought of ourselves as such in any way that matters.
Buddy and I are just “folk,” and each of us has the great gift of seeing other people, of all shades or colors of skin, for the hearts that lie under it. Or when it comes to religion, it being irrelevant if “the other guy” has one ... or not. Or as to which one. Buddy and I each lives as a bi-ped and sees others of that genus for who they were, and are, solely within that criterion, i.e., in their hearts and souls.
The example of Robert Bowers, the apparent Squirrel Hill murderer, is of a man who, in all likelihood, grew up in a family or a segment of society that taught its young to hate all of those “not like us.” And that exclusionary mindset affects entirely too many of us. For a vast segment of Americans are raised to hate others who are just as are they in every meaningful respect — except for that hatred.
DON SWITZER Rogers