By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services
“I don’t want to live in a neighborhood with 50,000 Mexicans.”
Huh? This was a rant in progress, but I wasn’t sure why she was venting it at me – well, yes I was. Something I wrote – a column bashing the “English First” movement in Green Bay, Wis. – had set her off, and now she was spilling her two cents’ worth on immigration and foreigners into the phone. Fine. That I got.
Nevertheless, I sat immobile as she went on and on, unprepared to argue or even object. My combat trigger was disarmed, like when you get an inane call in the middle of the night and you’re too stunned to remember to be angry. This wasn’t the middle of the night, but I’d been utterly lost in some work-related task when my phone rang and I was hazily regrouping when she started in on me. The gist of her fury, as it exploded from the receiver, simply eluded me.
“They own Miami,” she was saying. “They OWN it!”
She was fuming about this, but for all her misplaced passion, I couldn’t rouse myself for the head-on confrontation she apparently expected. I had no interest in challenging her facts or passing judgment on her prejudices. Instead I just listened and, out of force of habit, jotted notes. I guess I was trying to summon my pugnacity – she was, after all, 100 percent wrong – but all I could put forth for my end of the conversation was a sort of reverent, absorbing silence.
A surprising thing happened. By yielding rather than meeting force with force, I inadvertently caused the caller’s center of gravity to shift and her anger toppled of its own weight. “You’re not saying anything,” she said, accusingly.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“You are?”
And suddenly, thanks to my unintentional verbal jujitsu, the tone of our encounter shifted, into something I might almost call respectful discussion. The more I think about this, the more I whistle with awe. I mean, this is the great national divide, is it not? If you fear foreigners and foreignness, if the sound of speech other than English is just so much threatening chatter, if you think, as my caller declared before catching her first breath, that “pluralistic societies don’t work,” then you’re on one side of it, aren’t you? Your patriotism will be in service to your suspicions: desperate, armed, wary. You’ll lack access to any point of view grounded in a borderless fascination with humankind.
“Countries are wonderful when they have an ethnic base. Here everybody thinks something different. ‘Do you want to hear this in Spanish or English?’ – it’s everywhere in this country! Yet the Europeans that apply have to wait years to get in. People want to live with people who are like they are. What is wrong with like-minded people? What’s going on here is just insane.”
Truth be known, I didn’t respond to her because I just didn’t know where to start. My pluralistic heart is nourished on the lifeblood of reason. She had me routed with her dogged cliches. I saw no way past them. I was speechless.
This is what happened: She mulled my comment that I was listening to her and then, after a long pause, thanked me. “You’re a real gentleman,” she said.
I am?
And then she crossed the divide of her own accord. This may not seem like much. It may even seem patronizing, her concession that she’s gotten so accustomed to an integrated society that, “I feel funny if I’m in a crowd of people and there are no black faces in it.”
America on the other side of the divide – a whisper of tolerance! “No kidding,” I said. And let there be hope, I thought, as we said goodbye in calm voices.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is a nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.
(c) 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
April 10, 2011 – April 23, 2011 Edition
