Do you #Care?

By Dan Barber

Needing someone to care is ingrained in every human being…and stepping back from my own selfish human needs and taking a long view of others who don’t have anyone to care or to love them makes me feel sad.

It doesn’t take much effort to acknowledge others…eye contact, a smile or nod could help make someone’s day. However, human contact can be tricky. My attractive daughter told me that she and her equally attractive friend can’t make friendly eye contact or smile at men while running routine errands. That behavior could create a situation that causes the man to make an unwanted advance toward them. Also, if a spouse witnessed their significant other smiling at someone of the opposite sex could cause trouble.

Now our society has made human interaction even more difficult because it has been reengineered to the point where confusion ensues in how to politely address gender when speaking to a stranger, i.e. do you address them as Ma’am, Sir, or Hey you?  It’s especially terrifying in a public unisex bathroom!

Writers are now encouraged to call everyone “they” to avoid confusion and to save column inches in the editorial hole of a publication. This makes me think “they are out to get us.” It can be politically incorrect or uncomfortable to ask “who is they, so don’t ask.”

We can now watch a television newscast report of a serious criminal running loose in our community who is armed and dangerous and “if you see this person, stay clear of them”…a physical description is now politically incorrect to report… sorry, you’re on your own.

Other situations of human contact can be deadly. Without the anthropological or social knowledge in some environments, an innocent attempt at conversation as simple as, “Hi, do you live here” can lead to a violent response…especially if the person was the subject of the above newscast or a member of the local street gang.

Cultural differences can also lead to racial misunderstandings. I am a white man who wishes I could find the privilege that some people say us white people have. Don’t get me wrong, I know from the history of our country people have been severely mistreated. As a child of the 50s, I saw people being mistreated just because they were the “wrong” color. Then as a teen of the 60s I witnessed an uprising of the human spirit. I heard about a quote from a speech Dr. Martin Luther King gave about his dream that one day everyone would be judged on the merit of their character not the color of their skin.

In the four decades since that time we have gone through an upheaval in social changes not to cement Dr. King’s dream into our social norm, but to reverse the meaning of that dream to “I deserve special treatment because of the color of my skin.”

Jim Crow laws ruled the South for 100 years. The only comfort that blacks had during this period was maybe the segregationist rule of “separate but equal.” According to Wikipedia, “Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified and permitted racial segregation as not being in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws. Under the doctrine, the government was allowed to require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be separated along racial lines, provided that the quality of each group's public facilities was equal.”

Do we really need separate things today based on race and expect them to be equal to everyone’s interests or understanding?

Are we going back to those “bad old days” because we are afraid of losing our cultural identity or just in need of someone to care about who we are?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just be judged on the merit of our character?