The America I Want

I saw something on my daily walk today around my apartment complex that my heart, brain and soul really needed to see. Every day around a quarter to four in the afternoon the school bus pulls up and unloads all of the neighborhood kids. Shortly after the kids arrived today I was walking by one of the many ponds on the golf course that surrounds the apartment complex and witnessed two black kids, one white kid and one Hispanic kid – all probably middle school aged – throwing rocks into a pond and laughing and having a good time.

That's the America I want.

That’s the America we would live in today if all of us retained our beliefs of adolescence where race, religion, sexual preference and such don’t seem to matter or come into play.

However, the America we do live in will likely have these kids hating each other – or at the very least having nothing to do with each other – by the time they're done with high school.

There seems to be something between adolescence and adulthood where humans realized the differences in others and something about those differences bother them, oftentimes to the point of hate.

Maybe those days will come to an end before these young boys grow up and they won’t have to live in a world that’s deemed the “Land of the Free,” but remains far from equal.

But, the chances of that frankly seem unlikely when you realize the reason why things continue to be vastly unequal in this country are because of the generations before us passing down prejudices and racism to their children.

Sure, there are fewer prejudices and less racism today than say 50 or 60 years ago, but it won’t completely disappear because there are enough people who continue to pass it down and at times – like today in this country – it seems to bubble over.

In Tom T. Hall’s great 1972 song “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine” he wrote the line “God bless little children while they’re still too young to hate.” Hopefully the children I saw playing today and not caring one bit about their differences or the way they looked will maintain that innocence into adulthood. Hopefully the generation before them will allow that to happen.