Part of what happened is that the gunman who killed 9 very special people in Charleston SC last Wednesday was greeted with warmth and caring, and it was almost enough to change his mind. But unfortunately it was not enough. Why was it not enough?
Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a song in South Pacific that addresses this:
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught.
The killer was made welcome, was greeted warmly, was treated as a human being by people that he had been taught were inhuman monsters. The reality that he experienced was not enough to change the picture that had been planted in his mind over and over again during the years when as a child his mind was trying to decipher the world of his senses. In the end, what he had been taught before he was "six or seven or eight" was more real to him than what he experienced that night. It had to be a trick being played on him by these black monsters. What his mother and father taught him could not be that wrong. All too often people see what they believe, rather than believing what they see. And what we believe is usually set by the time we are six or seven or eight, and is very hard to change after that. By eight we have put together a jigsaw puzzle image of the world, and before we can put in any new pieces we have to take out old pieces to make room, which is very hard and uncomfortable and leaves us feeling vulnerable, so very few people voluntarily do it often.
People can grow up comfortable with open minds. But it is much harder to raise people to be comfortable with a changing jigsaw puzzle than to be comfortable with a static jigsaw puzzle. Much harder, but ultimately much more successful and productive. We know how, and after Sputnik for a brief time our educational system and our national determination fostered that, but then the older generation became frightened of how many things young people questioned, and also of how little young people were listening to older people, who did have some valuable contributions to make from experience. We have not yet managed to keep enough open mindedness for several generations in a row so that young people could work with older people respectfully sharing different visions.
And progressives still disrespect conservatives and conservatives still disrespect progressives, instead of realizing that sometimes we just see different parts of the same reality, like the urban legend of the car that was blue on one side and red on the other so that the witness descriptions would always disagree. Sometimes we see things differently because they really do look different from one side than from the other side. But almost no one is that open minded.