What Makes Us Special?

I was fortunate to be raised by parents who were quite different from one another. They viewed the world differently, and they travelled through it differently. My father was a private pilot and often took me along when he ferried the wealthy friends of his employer to the annual Opera Festival in San Antonio. I learned young to be comfortable around the wealthy, even if I was not one of them.

My mother included me in her search for a kinder God, not the one she was brought up to believe in. We went to many different churches, and every congregation was unique. The ideals of faith and worship were not assigned to me, rather I was free to choose—the Mexican Mariachis, the choir at the black Baptist church, the tent revivals, the healing services. Perhaps all of them.

I learned a lot from this unusual journey. Even though I was a White girl who lived in a nice neighborhood and went to a good school, this did not make me special. My race did not make me better than those elegant members of the Black Choir, or the poor children playing out in the field at the tent revival. Being Christian did not make me better than the Jewish family who shared their faith with me as they grieved the death of their young daughter. Not race, nor gender, nor our faith practices make us better.

Only what we do allows us to grow better. We are being fed the worst lie in America today, and it is coming from our leader. We are told that some of us are better than others, and some deserve to take rather than give. That some should not even be treated as human, only because of how or where they were born. We must not succumb to this. We are not born good because we perceive others as born bad. We do not take because we think others exist to give to us. We do not punish or exclude others only because they were born different.

It is the good we do that can make us special. Our courage, our generosity, our compassion. Our determination to see all others as equal, even if different. We take the time to know them, and if they need help, we give it. Only this can make us special.