Heavy

I wasn’t going to write today. The last couple of days have been full of cleaning and stacking wood, and taking care of animals and children, etc., etc., etc. Nothing out of the ordinary but busy.

Then this morning while I was drinking my glass of milk that I’ll call breakfast, I was checking my emails and looking at Facebook and on the side there are notifications of things your Facebook friends have liked or commented on and one of them said, “Latino Problems.” Two simple words and my heart was suddenly heavy and I wanted to cry.

The world that we live in is so very messed up. It is going to take a huge purging to make things right and if biblical scholars and others are correct in that the world has been baptized in water already and that it needs to be by fire, it’s ready.

It is okay for Latinos to have problems. It’s okay for other ethnic groups to have problems. But I, being white, am not able to have problems, or at least voice them, for fear of offending someone. Except that I generally voice my opinion anyway because I don’t believe in being politically correct. My opinions are just as valid as anyone else’s and I have just as much right to voice them. Do you find that offensive?

I was raised by two parents who loved me even if they were not good at expressing that love. We were not rich by any stretch of the imagination and when I was in 7^th or 8^th grade, my dad lost his job at the mill because they were going through major changes. For the rest of my growing up years, he struggled to find and keep a job.

I finished growing up and found myself in the unenviable position of being a single mom. I could be on welfare or go to work. I was on welfare but went to work. Until I finished my two-year Associate of Arts degree, I worked part-time but once I was done, I worked full time. During that part time bit my daughter and I were welfare recipients but it was of a short duration.

Interestingly, I went to work for the Siskiyou County Welfare Department; now politically correctly called the Siskiyou County Department of Health and Human Services. Welfare Department is a whole lot shorter people, and takes less ink to print. While I was there, there was a woman who also worked there whose mother was Mexican. This woman was urged to state for the record that she was Latino so they would be able to have that quota filled. She refused.

People should not be hired because of the color of their skin but for the content of their minds and their abilities. Color of skin should just be something that makes us each unique; something that tells a little, but certainly not all, of our ethic background.

Please look at this picture closely. I just took it this morning. Does my skin look white to you? All those hairs used to be dark brown. They were so dark that when I was in 5th grade I shaved some off my right arm and quickly decided that dark hair on my arms was better than no hair at all.
When I was working for my phlebotomy internship, I got to draw blood from a lot of different people. Many of them were of African decent. I got to look at the skin of all these people very closely and I can tell you that I never saw any black skin. One man in particular I remember. I looked at his arm and it was beautiful. There was blue and green and yellow and red. All right there. It was his skin. No black, but all these other colors. It was beautiful.
Black is the absence of color.

While you are having the fabulous day I hope you do, I would welcome any thoughts or comments about this.