PEOPLE WATCHING

I love to watch people, strangers are the most fun since I don’t know them and can only imagine. Sometimes I go to the mall with TLW (The Little Woman) and sometimes I go alone, and will sit on occasion to rest a moment in one of the comfortable seats that line the strip of stores in the mall’s wing. As I do I watch people as they go by and see what they dress like, or eat or have as company and imagine what they do for a living or what their personalities are.

Once I sat and watches a group of old guys sitting and making commentary about the young ladies as they passed, and the things they said was crude but amusing. I’m sorry if that offends you, but they were funny.

I once passed a skeleton and as it stood there in a corner of a novelty store, I started to get my imagination going, and found that there was nothing I could do to parlay this skeleton into a personality. It seemed there were no clues, no indications and no way to tell anything about this person. I remember in a science class in college seeing this skeleton and wondering who he was, where he came from and what he did, even wondering how he died.

It got me thinking recently about all the issues of Ferguson Missouri, Staten Island and all the blacks that died at the hands of the police, for whatever reasons. I wondered how embedded our prejudices are and how deep our suspicions lie? I wonder how the police can do their job without bias, either as blacks or whites. I see the individuals who are victims and I wonder what makes for such explosive situations?

There is very definitely a cultural difference in this country between blacks, whites and Asians, from culture to language to attitudes towards each other. I love America, and wish it were more accepting of everyone. I grew up in a racially divided neighborhood where anyone who wasn’t white appeared and became under suspicion. It seems that the inherited cultural and racial bias in all of us: each color and flavor is prevailing to this day, even with a Mulatto president! Where have we gone wrong?

Too bad things are like that, too bad we need to be selective based on race or religion or sex or even gender. Too bad there is so much to choose from, to be able to qualify someone for hatred. Too bad we can hate even a small child based on skin pigmentation.

Back to the skeleton-that skeleton, with all the mystery about it, one that may be hundreds of years old tells us nothing about the person who once was, yet he is teaching us one basic lessen: be it Jew, Christian or Muslim, white or black, straight or gay and male or female, we ALL end up the same way, we are all built the same way under the tags and labels and colors, so we spend our time hating our selves