Reading about the overt community hatred and terrorist tactics directed at the
Dobrich family who were forced to move from their home has hurt my heart and created a tremendous dissonance in my psyche. This is the country
I live in? I thought I was prepared for most anything after the shocking descent of the past 5 Bush years - I was wrong. This story doesn't just anger me, it anguishes me.
That 6th grade Dobrich boy and I have a lot in common. I was in the same place as that boy but for another time and state of our union (literally and figuratively). But our stories had very different endings...
In 1964, our family moved from Enid, OK (can we say "WASP"?) to Niles, IL, a suburb of Chicago. It was the mid-term of my 6th grade year and it wasn't just culture shock, I was the proverbial Stranger in a Strange Land.
There was a lot about me to make fun of there. I had an Okie accent that no doubt made me sound like a hick to those big city Yankee ears. I was comparatively advanced in the physical development department (all that Oklahoma sunshine?), so I stood a good head taller than most all of my classmates, which made it appear, relative to my classmates there, as though I was a 16 year old 6th grader. So not just a hick, but a Big Dumb Hick. And I was the only gentile in the school. (Actually, someone had to tell me I was a gentile and explain the definition of the term.)
I'd never met a Jew before (that I knew of). I had no preconceived notions at all, having had no experience good or bad or any knowledge whatsoever of the culture or religion. (While my family went to church some Sundays, religion played essentially no part in our lives outside of the social realm - something for which I have always been grateful to my parents.) I will never forget my first days at my new school when the kids asked me, even before my name, "what is your religion?" Um... Methodist? I honestly knew not how to answer that. No one had ever asked me before. Big Dumb Hick, indeed.
Pretty miserable time, huh? It sure could have been, but the reality was that I felt welcomed and accepted almost immediately. Instead of being made fun of for my obvious differences, my classmates taught me to embrace those differences, have fun with them and even use them to my advantage, a lesson for which I will always be deeply grateful. I still look back at that time with such love for those kids and their families for whom it would have been so easy to ostracize and cruelly tease The Outsider, the Big Dumb Hick. But they didn't. Not. One. Time.
They didn't call me dumb for my ignorance of their religion and culture - they taught me about it. They didn't call me a hick - they were interested in learning about where I came from and what it was like there. They didn't tease me for my physical differences - they were mostly envious (especially the girls who had yet to grow, yanno, mammaries. LOL). They didn't call me evil for not believing as they did - it was just a fact that I wasn't Jewish and it wasn't an issue at all. They didn't reject and isolate me for not being like them - they opened their hearts and welcomed me into their homes and lives.
Reading about the misery, threats and fear inflicted on the Dobrich family, and even more on the Dobrich boy ("take your yarmulke off!"), I can't help but to compare the loving generosity of that Jewish community I was so fortunate to have known to this vicious, hateful community that I am sickened to share this country with.
What the hell has happened to us?