Too easy
By Brandon Astor Jones
"It was fun meeting other people, seeing what they're like ... they're really just like us." — Adrian Proby
When left to their own devices, we can usually depend upon children to cut through those socialised layers of resentments, bigotries and gender-related discriminations an amazing number of adults have accumulated over the years.
Vastly different socioeconomic experiences isolate people from each other. People are held apart by a kind of interactive ignorance, defined by the lack of a common language and frame of reference, so that when necessity forces them together, many take an absurd kind of comfort in an unnatural fear.
With the recent proliferation of computers with which students can access the Internet and a multiplicity of electronic bulletin boards, they too often know more about the people who live on the other side of the world than those who live next door.
Of course, I am all for global knowledge and the embracing of the world as one community. The concept is wonderful. At a school in Australia, pre-teens have computer pen pals from around the world. The principal notes that when children work and play on the Internet they greatly improve their science, technology, geography, social studies and writing skills.
The principal's mother and I correspond by so-called "snail mail" at least once a week. Via letters, we have been, pulling out those communication wedges that culture, gender and geography have created. Rarely does a week go by that we do not exchange at least one cultural revelation.
In Kennesaw, Georgia, at the Awtrey Middle School, Effie Bazmore, one of two African-American faculty members there, has started an important program. (The school has a student body of 1100, 5% of whom are African-American.) Bazmore's cultural exchange program unites a group of Awtrey's students and a group of Long Middle School's students (the latter's predominantly African-American student body of 950 contains 10 Caucasian Americans).
Many of the Long students are residents of a public housing complex. None of their parents are wealthy. Some of Awtrey's students live in equally meagre trailer parks, while others' parents are members of the plush Pine Tree Country Club. The two schools are about 50 kilometres apart, but in many ways they might just as well be half a world apart.
Via questionnaires, Bazmore got the students of both schools' sixth grade language classes to cite their favourite foods, hobbies, songs, television programs. Shortly after, youngsters with similar interests began exchanging letters. Real cultural revelations began to emerge and concrete friendships quickly solidified, as demonstrated by the words of the young African-American from Long at the beginning of this column.
Often children can enlighten their parents. Leslie Wade is a Caucasian American who attends Awtrey. Her parents were apprehensive about the program, their concerns fuelled by news accounts of violence in the city of Atlanta. Nevertheless, when they saw how happy their daughter was with the program, they too began to support it. Leslie later said, "I think sometimes we make people out to be something they are not".
Carolyn S. Meredith, a language teacher at Long, said, "We cannot polarise ourselves ... We all have to communicate with each other in this world — all races, creeds and colours."
I agree, and neighbours should be added to everybody's list of potential friends. So many young people in the USA are hurting and shooting one another, and very often it is neighbour assaulting a neighbour.
How nice it would be if people — young and old alike — would take the time to write a letter of introduction and offer the gift of friendship to their next door neighbour(s). There is no telling how many resentments, arguments and even shootings such letters could pre-empt. But for some, that would be just a little bit too hard to do — because it would be too easy.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]