Sawhorse

Last night I felt the anguish of hundreds of years of unchangeable history wringing tears from my eyes, my body shaking with the knowledge that time takes time. We cannot erase the past but we learn from what those before us learned.

Music. Mathematics. Happiness. Non-generational. Non-gender. Non-ethnic. We can share the pain, expose our emotional weaknesses, show that in all of us are fear, longing and hope unrealized.

Tenuous. Momentary. Fragile.

I am a lucky person. I grew up without knowledge of the blinders people put on themselves and their children.

In the mirror I see an American male of northern European descent yet my best friends when I first started public school were of African descent and we took classes in Spanish in our first and second school years together. When I entered the office world, my first interview was with a fellow southern American who happened to be African-American. One of my favorite fellow employees is Indian and we like to eat hot, spicy food at Thai restaurants together. Some of my best managers have been female African-Americans and this is while living in Alabama (the "Heart of Dixie," our automobile license plates state). When I started out as a manager, my first employee was African-American, the best qualified person for the job. I have worked with, employed and worked for people who grew up in different places all over the world, with gender preferences that truly define a rainbow of differences. My wife and I owned part of a Japanese restaurant managed by a European-American man and Filipino-American woman with a great male Chinese server who worked there.

I cried last night because the media still wants to report impartial news stories that impart two-dimensional tales, stereotypical "either/or" stuff. Why?!?!?!!

Why are we always looking for a smoking gun? Why do we want people to blame or place guilt upon?

Why? Because it reflects us as one people. Our media reflect and drive forward our crowd personality with simple messages. Mob mentality for the sake of advertising revenue.

Every one of us has a child in our personality that remembers the love and discipline of our adult caretakers. We seek love and generally avoid harsh discipline. We don't want to hear harmful words and shouldn't have to.

At the same time, as adults we can recognize the history behind words with negative connotations and understand what others have taught us. We can open up conversations and ask what certain words mean to each other and why we don't want to hear them, healing the hurt inside for us as individuals and for us as one people.

Learning is joyful and painful. We cannot find innovative ways to create a sustainable future if we ignore the past. Sure, the past is behind us but we carry the past in our thoughts in every moment. Examine all your thoughts, understanding what they mean, both happy ones and sad ones. Don't be misled by media headlines. Look at yourself and those around you. You don't have to believe the stereotypes presented to you.

As I have demonstrated to myself, I will not let those who seek advantages in creating class warfare win. My associates will hunt them down, gladly marking the losers' foreheads with whatever we feel like carving. It will not be pretty (and keep in mind, this is a figurative form of speech - literal carving is too temporary for real accomplishments). We have come too far in our battles to unite the planet to let us lose ground during a good moment while we're celebrating a recent victory.

We are not trying to create a one world government or one culture movement. We celebrate diversity. We want different points of view in charge of regional areas of the world. Otherwise, we will stop learning from each other. But we will not accept intolerance. We will destroy those who have goals which seek the classification of people for negative purposes.

I warn those of you who segregate, those who blame your economic poverty or paucity of happiness on others. I am not the one you want to raise my ire. I am working to improve your life. But if you go after anyone for destructive reasons, you have not me but all my friends, colleagues and associates who will go after you with joy. I have no power in me. The power of those who unite will overcome those who speak ill of the dead or try to kill wastefully.

And meanwhile, the planet keeps going around the Sun, always just one ecological calamity away from erasing all of us. That's why it's important for us to stick together. We can't easily predict the next tsunami or solar flare but we can be united in being able to help each other recover from one while using technology to develop models for predicting volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, typhoons / hurricanes and incoming comets.