Oddly enough the idea for a collaborative blog, representing divergent viewpoints, came to Brad and me in the midst of the fireworks of the 2016 presidential campaign. During our informal meetings to chat about the state of education in Utah, a topic very dear to both of us, we realized something odd. We listened to each other with open minds and a respectful and generous spirit of curiosity to better understand each other’s very different ideas. Our common interest and experience in Utah’s public education system created the conditions for us to look at our own religious, political, and philosophical perspectives more closely so that we could better understand the other person’s “place in the world.”
Growing up in California, our dinner table was a place for hot political conversations. My father was the oldest of eleven children, enlisted at 16 in the Marines right after Pearl Harbor, becoming both a patriotic idealist and somewhat of a revolutionary thinker, fearlessly standing up for the poor and disenfranchised throughout his entire life. Speaking only Spanish in his home, his experience in school was less than positive and he responded to the well-documented racism in Los Angeles pubic schools in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s with indomitable courage labeled “incorrigible.”
My mother, on the other hand, though living through the Great Depression in a coal mining town in Southern Colorado, never felt the kind of poverty that my father experienced. Her parents and older sister, however, were plagued with health problems that forced them to relocate to Los Angeles to join other family members, searching for better medical care and job opportunities after the mines had closed. They boarded a troop train with my grandmother caring for a very ill husband and daughter, one with addison’s disease and the other diabetic. My mother described her experience of stepping off the train at Union Station as terrifying. She adjusted quickly, worked in a factory, danced to the Big Bands at the famous Palladium on Hollywood Boulevard, and became a devoted mother.
These two extraordinary people are my best teachers, still: one an optimistic idealist who survived the beaches of Saipan and the other a pragmatist with a mix of intuitive insight and cynicism. Our dinner table was always full of ideas, anything could be discussed, and disagreements were common. During the Vietnam War, after my brother left the seminary, his draft number made it likely that he would be drafted. Though my father insisted that the military was a patriotic duty, I argued against the government’s foreign policy, and my other had decided to move to Canada with John.
I have tried to follow their example in my own life: disagree with ideas, always question everything, stand up for those who are less fortunate, and practice taking others’ perspectives no matter how different. It is hard work, but in the end, people do matter more than ideas; they change with experience.
Across The Divide: A Dialogue 