From This Week in Freudenfreude: Surprise!
This is Naz Hassan:
As you can presumably infer from the photo, she's adorable, very young (4 years old), and a big fan of Halloween.
True enough. I’d call her unreasonably adorable, but all 4 year-olds are unreasonably adorable IMO.
You might even guess that she is of Syrian descent, and from that guess (correctly) that her family is Muslim.
What you can't tell is that she was born with a congenital defect in her heart, one that has required her to undergo several medical procedures….the last, and most important, was scheduled.... October 30. That is, of course, the day before Halloween.
Oh no! But wait, this is freudenfreude!
As it turns out, Naz's neighbors—some of them Muslim, some Christian, some Jewish, some adherents of no religion at all—decided they had a pretty good answer to that question. So, this year, Halloween was observed in Naz's neighborhood on both Oct. 31 AND Oct. 29. That meant that the night before undergoing the surgery (which was successful), Naz got a surprise. Her mother told her to put on her costume, as shown in the photo, and then they visited 60+ houses for some trick-or-treating.
So, here we have a heart-warming story about a bunch of neighbors coming together to save Halloween for a little girl at a trying period in her young life. That enough makes my day.
BUT, I see this kind of thing every week. This is America. That these neighbors, from different religious traditions and (non) beliefs, and ethnic backgrounds, came together to help out their neighbor is pretty neat to be sure. And, if I may be so bold to suggest, kinda what this country is all about. The commonplaceness of it is what makes it so remarkable.
Not only do most of us tolerate people of different creeds, ethnicities, gender identities and so on, what the past 7 years has shown me is the MAJORITY of us embrace pluralism. Voters have consistently rejected MAGA. Not by much, and we are not in the clear, because of our federal system, gerrymandering, and the electoral college.
But, again, the majority of us embrace pluralism and religious tolerance.
In this important way, we are at heart a welcoming country full of decent people. And the funny thing is, the more diverse a community that people live and grow up in, the greater degree of tolerance and inclusion we see in the people who live there. It’s when different kinds of demographics, for lack of a better word, segregate or are segregated from the “other” kind of Americans is where we see greater degrees of ignorance, intolerance and prejudice. Simply put, unfamiliarity breeds contempt. And to those of us who live in diverse, pluralistic communities, we don’t even notice it. And that is what makes this a Great Nation.
We always have a lot of news about what divides us, here in America. And here at the Daily Kos with the Christian/Atheists kerfuffles, and, obviously , the I/P fights since Oct. 7. And I think to myself, perhaps I ought to work a little harder on communicating with my neighbors, both here and in the real world, both near and far. Y’know, for Naz. Because when she is my age (thanks to medical science!!) I will be long gone from this planet. And she will live in the world I have bequeathed to her and all the other 4-year-olds out there.
And that includes, of course, the 4-year-olds in Israel and Gaza.