Unfolding Origami

I had a great 'origami exchange' with a elderly woman on my flight today. I gave her a butterfly in a small envelop. She was so thankful, but, after a few moments, I had to advise her that the gift was not simply a pretty rectangle. She opened it up and marveled at the butterfly. From the corner of my eye, I could see her examining it closely. After about 5 minutes, she asked if I could make her another one. "Sure", I said, "do you want a different color or something?". "No", she said, "the same color would be nice", and then she showed me a rectangular piece of paper which had previously been the butterfly. "I tried to figure out how it was made", she admitted. "No problem!", I replied, and then I countered, "I just hope you did not have a puppy when you were little" ;-)

Religious versus Spiritual

Whenever I hear one person say "we are born with an innate sense of 'goodness'", and another person say "without religion, there would be no check against our 'evilness'", I think that the first person forgot that they were born into a world that is already rooted in religion, and therefore grew up in an environment that is inescapable from its influences, and I think that the second person forgot that religion came from us, not divine providence, so its influences likely stem from an innate understanding of 'goodness', as surely as its perversions likely stem from our inadequate understanding. And then I remember that categorization is yet another fault in our thinking, as both of the actors depicted above likely have views that are along a spectrum of infinite granularity, and therefore always gray. And even here, some would say 'grey' ;-)

The American Roots of Racism

A friend of mine posted a question on FB that asked "if schools stopped teaching [that] America is built on racism and racism exists where none actually does [...] would [...] racism completely disappear in a generation?"

If you leave aside the presupposition and focus on the supposition, it is a very good question.

Here was my answer:

A question within your question is: where do children learn racism, either being racist or suffering from it? I think that they learn it long before they encounter any lessons about it in school. Still, you ask a great question. What if, instead of fixating on our sordid past, we, collectively, focused on the complex present and open future? Would it be better to learn about the causes and effects of economic and social injustice, our shared and personal responsibility to fight it and our common humanity, without linking it back to our racists roots? My answer is yes, because the historical root causes of economic and social injustice have little to do with the present day root causes or solutions, and the fixation on these historical root causes only widens the cultural divide that feeds racism. But this only works if we all commit to the ideals of equality and justice for all. When an African American man is shot 6 times in his car during a routine traffic stop, for no apparent reason other than the officer 'fearing for his life', and said officer is later cleared of any crime, then you have to expect an outsized reaction from African Americans, and you have to expect the search for why such a thing would happen. At that point, finding the cause in our past might actually be more palatable than the truth of the matter: racism is alive and well in the present. So the caveat to my answer is that we would need to grapple with this present day fact.

Thoughts?