A Diverse Community

Last night my wife Gloria and I got together with some friends and colleagues, most of whom I’ve known for ten years or more. Some I’d seen a number of times in recent months and some I hadn’t seen for years. It was a lively gathering with lots of laughter, vibrant conversation, and several bottles of wine. We talked about current events, past shared experiences, current passions that are driving us along in our professional and personal endeavors, the usual “cocktail party” fare.

But thinking about the gathering this morning a few notable things struck me. This group of ten people included two breast-cancer survivors. Six of the ten present will be spending all or most of this coming weekend performing a marathon walk to raise money for breast cancer research. Indeed, they were sporting custom-made hats celebrating the walk complete with the logo of the sponsoring company, my single biggest client for the past several years.

Another notable aspect to the group was their accomplishments: Among us were a CEO, two college professors, a retired creative director, and a two-time national Emmy Award winning video editor. I mention this not because we are defined by what we do or what level of “success” we have achieved – no, I mention it because our gathering was one of the most down-to-earth and least pretentious gatherings I’ve enjoyed in some time. There was no grandstanding or braggadocio or anything of that sort. We were just people enjoying community, fellowship, and a sense of our shared humanity. Among us there are several not insignificant differences, in religion, politics, socio-economic status, marital and familial status, race, and sexual orientation. And yet, none of those differences mattered a whit – if anything, these differences enriched our conversations and broadened our sense of community and fellowship.

It is easy, sometimes, for us to get cynical or dismissive when we hear a politician talking about how our nation’s diversity is a strength, not a weakness. We might roll our eyes at hearing the same old hackneyed phrase again and again. And yet. And yet! It’s true. When Christian and Jew and Agnostic and Atheist can sit around the same table and share hearty conversation and respectful humor, this is something to celebrate. When republicans and democrats and independents can discuss the historic nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States with no one engaging in useless and unfruitful hyperbole or ad hominum attacks, this is something to celebrate. (And, for the record, all gathered agreed that Rush Limbaugh has become absolutely certifiable lately – asserting that Sotomayor and Obama are anti-constitutionalists who want to shred the U.S. Constitution? Please, give me a break. But I digress.)

Our differences, when embraced, do strengthen us. They open us up to other perspectives, other ways of looking at the world, and that is a very good thing. We all can disagree without being disagreeable. We can disagree and continue to love and support and encourage one another. We can agree to disagree and then move forward to those things around which we find common ground. One of my friends at the gathering last night wisely noted that our entire system is built on the idea of compromise and yet too much of the rhetoric we hear shouted on the cable news programs – from the right and from the left – is black and white, night and day, extreme, extreme, extreme. It’s enough, already. As Tori Murden McClure notes in her magnificent new book, A Pearl in the Storm, “Good and evil are creations of mankind; in our image, we created them.”

Namaste.