Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [144]
In Lincoln I found two worlds. We have a prosperous middle-class culture and a culture of the poor. I had been in one and I began to move in the other. Neither culture has a monopoly on happiness or truth. I enjoyed the second culture a great deal. Sometimes it seemed more honest, more authentic and caring. Poor people can't afford not to share.
I felt schizoid. I'd spend time with my friends and we'd talk about new movies and CDs, and book signings we might attend. My friends talked about the stock market or whether they should remodel their kitchens. Then I'd visit refugees and talk about slavery in Sudan or how to smuggle insulin into Iraq.
Once I left a potluck party with tables filled with fruit, salads, and sliced meats and fish. I stopped by Bintu's to hear that two of her friends from the camp in Ghana had starved to death. They were allowed only four cups of rice a month. She said, "They will all die eventually if we don't get them out of there."
A friend told me about meeting a man from Togo. He had been the bodyguard to the king, but he had joined a small group trying to bring in democracy. He was arrested and sentenced to die. He swam with his family across a river to a refugee camp where they lived for seven years. Now he was in Nebraska. He asked my friend for a desk that had been carried to the street for trash pickup. My friend said he could have the desk and later saw him carrying the desk down the street on his shoulders.
Too often we Americans, myself included, indulge ourselves in the great white whine and complain about the .001 percent of our lives that is not perfect. There was a New Yorker cartoon labeled "Yuppie angst" in which a character driving a car says to his rider, "Oh no, I spilled cappuccino on my down vest." I realize that much of my misery is "Yuppie angst." I worry about a postponed hair appointment or a dying rosebush. Meanwhile, my refugee friends worry about whether their relatives will starve to death or their friends are being tortured.
Even though I always have played some variant of the globe game, that is to say, I have always been interested in others, I started this project as a white protected Nebraskan. I am Irish-English married to a Heinz 57 German. Most of my friends were of European background. As I've made friends with people of Mideastern, Latino, African, and Southeast Asian backgrounds, I've changed a great deal. I've stopped seeing myself as a member of a majority culture. Instead, I see myself as a member of a world culture that flourishes in my hometown.
I have grown both more and less aware of differences. I have more appreciation for the endless variations of the human experience, and yet I'm aware we are all more alike than we are different. Leonard Peltier described my feelings exactly when he wrote, "You reach across the world of otherness to one, and you touch your own soul." I have become part of that new American race that includes all colors and is characterized by Alice Walker as "people who love." Lincoln has become for me the middle of everywhere.
I'VE BECOME A COMPLEX PATRIOT
We hope the world won't narrow into a neighborhood until it has broadened into a brotherhood.
—LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON
Researching this book has made me both more critical and more appreciative of America. I have seen through the eyes of newcomers how we treat our most vulnerable residents. During a time when we gave ourselves a tax cut, our government refused to allocate funds to support the Kakuma refugees while they attended high school. These refugees had spent their childhoods without parents, eating grass, and watching their friends being killed. Now, in this country, they desperately needed to learn to read. Instead, our government told them they must support themselves and even repay their plane ticket expenses. Meanwhile, we gave