Relish Treasure Finder

I consider myself one of you.  Fortunate to have friends all over the world - friends I found engaged in work situations, sitting in classrooms, focused on retail shopping, walking down the street or cheering in the stadium.  I've worked with and for people of many social, cultural, and family backgrounds, with gender preference never an issue that was or became an issue.  We were and still are who we are.  We need be no more or less than us.

Thus, it pains me when I see trends emerge that contradict what I believe friendship to be - a sample of the cosmos of cosmic relationships.  Especially when I can do little to stop the trends that appear to be our society out of control.  Even more so when I see that it is selfish people or groups who are working others into a frenzy unnecessarily so.

You are my brothers and sisters.  Like siblings with distinctly different personalities, I will disagree with you when I feel you're taking a wrong turn in life.  You may not listen to me or know I'm talking to you but I'll hold my ground and maintain my train of thought until you catch on to what I'm saying.

In my walk through life today, driving through north Alabama with my wife, seeing all the small stores and cafes that have folded during this economic downturn, including one of our favorites, the Blue Willow, I have met new friends and talked with you on short but intimate terms.  We learn what we can in those quiet moments of one-to-one eye contact.  The deep browns, the light greens, the sparkling blues.

I love you all.  You know that and hopefully you see my loving smile when we look at each other.  I am happy to meet you even if just for a quick glance across the clothes racks at Unclaimed Baggage Center or the tables at Thai Garden or when my wife and I bought Girl Scout cookies from a mother and her cheerful daughters at Star Market.

I will not accept defeat.  I will not let the world of disagreement drag me into a fight that is not mine.  Look at ourselves.  We're the only ones on this planet together.  Your ancestors aren't brandishing weapons.  Your unborn descendants aren't making the rules.  It's you and me.  That's it.  So get over the ancestor worship.  Quit quoting ancient texts and claim you can do nothing but repeat yourselves because some dead people said that's what you have to do to live or die.  I don't care about your dead family.  I have dead family, too, you know.  I have ancestors-turned-to-dust who would expect me to participate in genocide without blinking an eye.  In fact, they'd expect me to trade an eye for an eye, literally and metaphorically speaking.  I disregard their deadly decision-making.  I'm smarter than them and so are you.

Forget who you think you are.  You are not you.  I am not me.  We are one and the same.  I've said it over and over, repeating those who know what I'm talking about.  Let's use our common sense here, not our short-sightedness.

I picked up some books at Unclaimed Baggage today, books that I wanted to enrich my understanding of us and what makes us think we have to take wrong turns in life.  If you're a biker, a truck driver, a forklift operator, a dressmaker, a teacher, a banker, a farmhand, a religious leader, or a student, you learn something new every day.  You see new adverts.  You pick up a new trick in the trade.  You adapt to changing weather patterns.  You adjust your buying habits to your increasing or decreasing income.  You can learn, too, by reading and studying books outside your limited understanding of your subculture and see just how rich and powerful a mix of subcultures really is (because, no matter what you think you believe, your subculture is not the only one thinking it's the only one that knows and stays on the true path to wealth both here in this life and beyond).  Here are some books that I would not normally read but have chosen to read because I believe every one of you has something important to teach me.  I hope you can find similar books, or websites or people to teach you that we all contribute to our people's good health and happiness.

• Home Life in Colonial Days, by Alice Morse Earle
• The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria
• A Maggot, by John Fowles
• The Mad Ones, by Tom Folsom
• The Face Behind The Veil, by Donna Gehrke-White
• Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years, by Brian Feeney

Fame and fortune are fleeting.  Do not lose yourselves.  Yes, it's easy to forget you're an individual and join the crowd - we're social animals who tend to herd together in protected groups, still fearing the big, bad animals lurking out there in the dark of night - and yet we learn specialised skills.  Focus on your specialties, your unique qualities, the parts of you that stand out and help you help yourself and others live with one another.  Quit making each other out to be evil.  Every lifestyle has risen out of localised needs to find a niche for survival.  When two contradictory lifestyles come together, find what works between/with them, not force one to suppress what might be the only survival trait we'll all need at some future point.

History is full of one subculture meeting another, with violent clashes where one group kills people in the other group, along with their knowledge that would have helped the next civilisation grow and thrive, forcing everyone to start over.

In a recent movie, a cinema character called another one a con artist for turning people's flats and houses into ideal selling points because furniture and home accessories were moved in temporarily to make the place a home.  We all fall victim to con artists of this sort.  We create self-promotional marketing campaigns and turn ourselves into walking adverts that simplify who we are and what we represent.  Don't be fooled by your own confidence trick.  Just like aboriginal people of the Pacific Northwest who put up totem poles to indicate their wealth and status, we are not the carvings we create.  We are not the magic tricks we play on stage.  Don't be a victim of your own imagination.

Most good sports coaches will tell you to get out of your head and get into your body.  Your thoughts do not score goals.  Your thoughts do not win games.  Your bodies make the moves that help you achieve your victories.

I am talking to you, to us, as bodies here.  We can win together when we get the images out of our heads that falsely indicate we are part of some subgroup that's better than others.  The fact is that our success and failure depend on people all over this planet who use their bodies to complete tasks we could not achieve with ease.

You can keep fighting each other, if you want.  I will not stop you.  But I will work to ensure those who want to turn each other into mortal enemies will be sequestered and put into a hole where neither one of you will escape alive unless you decide that you have better things to do, like working with the rest of us to share our subcultures and learn from one another.  Again, we don't have to like each other or agree but we can give each other room to enjoy our subcultures how we choose as long as it doesn't include killing those in other subcultures.

I'll give you some more time to think about this.  Then, at some point in the future, you will have to make a decision.  Respect one another and all of our rights to celebrate our subcultures, or don't.  If you choose the latter, then you'll deal not with me (I'm an easygoing guy) but with those who have been trained to take care of intolerance.  It's not a threat or a promise.  It's just the way we are, you and me.

Meantime, I've got to get back to the world of those who do want to work well with others.  I don't have time for those who want to drag others down with them.  See you on the bright side.  With a smile.  And a hearty laugh.