Assumptions All Around

It seems like just when you think that you've gotten pretty good at recognising the assumptions you commonly make, another one jumps out at you.

With only half realising it, I had been making assumptions about bus drivers. Now this may seem really petty, but it ended up being something that totally shocked me yesterday. I realised that as a precaution, I had stereotyped them all as being the sort of middle-aged, white males that were probably conservative. I now know that this was so that I wouldn't end up "slipping" and saying something that would create this whole political atmosphere that would impede our comfortable relationship. Yesterday I got to find out how ridicule this assumption was...

My driver yesterday was telling us about how he'd always wait for us, that he didn't like it when drivers took off even though you could see the person just out of reach of the bus. It sounded like part of it came from his wife being in front of the bus when some driver started off. Our driver said that he figured that it was partly because she was black, and that he never found out who it was because he knew that fighting the other driver wouldn't do any good. This all lead into him telling us about how fe believed Gandhi saying that fighting doesn't solve anything, that all these wars haven't fixed things, that he's been trying help his son not be a fighter, and how he served a little in Vietnam.

It's amazing what the truth is sometimes.

The Future

One of the things that I am doing this session as part of my afterschool program is assisting a woman with her Girl Scout troop. This is purely for background. It was just that I had a thought at the celebration they had last Wednesday to welcome in the new girls to the troop.

While disappointing in the number, one set of parents showed up. I think I spent the rest of the time trying to figure out whose parents they were.

I think that it was just extra intriguing (because I think I would have done this guessing if any other parents had shown up) because the father was Hispanic and the mother was Caucasian. It feels a little bad that I was extra intrigued by this, but at least I admit I was. I was curious of who had the mixed family.

(Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against mixed families. I have a niece and a nephew that are bi-racial kids and I think that they are very adorable.)

The thing that I started wondering about was what were the long term possibilities. I just wondered what positive (or negative) effects that it might have on our ethnic tensions...Would anything change? Would we become more fractioned? Might skin color start to matter less because we would have become more of the melting pot that America had been thought of? (Even though there has been some questioning of the benefit of the so-called melting pot because it results in the loss of a sense of culture and familial history, I think that this is one way in which it might be good...And then we just have to make the effort to pass on the traditions in our own way. Or something.)

It's that last one that I want to hope for.