Making Lemonade

A five-year old American boy stands with a Mexican vendor on a Guadalajara street corner. The man sells lemonade to passersby. The boy has filled his little beach pail with bottled water from his room in the adjoining hotel. Now he emulates his new amigo as he hawks his pretend concoction, "Agua, agua limonada!" The boy's voice wafts through the open window of the hotel room above, where his distraught parents search for him. They look out the window with both relief and pain as they spot their little boy on the street below, trying with all his tiny might to share the life and culture of a foreign country.

Soon thereafter the same little boy attends Mexican kindergarten in a Guadalajara suburb. His dad, fluent in Spanish since growing up on a ranch in southeastern Arizona, works in Mexico for the AFTOSA project seeking to eradicate hoof and mouth disease in Mexican cattle. They young boy learns Spanish in that local parochial school. In fact, he speaks Spanish "mejor de ingles," which is good, because most of his friends and playmates are Mexican children. The year is 1951. For the rest of his life, he will always consider Mexicans to be his amigos buenos.

Many years later in Baltimore, MD, another five-year old boy skips along beside his father on their morning walk to home daycare not far from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The father is working on a master's degree. Many fellow students fear living so close to the campus, because they consider the area undesirable, meaning ethnically not white. But this boy's parents choose to live in that neighborhood for exactly the diversity that it offers their children. The five-year old boy is the only white child in his daycare setting. His older brother and sister walk to the foot of Chester Street every morning, along with their Filipino neighbor, to attend a small Catholic school. The white kids are the minority race in this school among Asian, Hispanic, and black children. The year is 1994.

In yet another time and place, an older white man fully appreciates that the happenstance of his genetics and chromosomes placed him always in the majority, until now. Early in his 7 ^th decade of life he feels for the first time the real sting of discrimination. Evaluated in an organization that prides itself on commitment to diversity, he is judged not by the performance reflected in his record, or on the strength of his character, or on the promise of his leadership experience. His future is determined simply by the first digit of his age, a "6." The year is 2008.

Unlike performance, character, and experience he has no control over the date of his birth, no more than his friends can control the color of their skin or the native language of their parents. Such is the vile nature of discrimination, wherein the value of the human being is supplanted by the circumstances of birth.

For a while that discrimination really hurts the sexagenarian. The man who once was the boy who sold pretend limonada on a Mexican street corner; who as a father deliberately taught his children to embrace diversity, and put them in circumstances where they could relish that experience; now fully understands that salt in a wound is far from salubrious. It simply burns. But with time he also realizes that his own infinitesimal taste of the pain of intolerance represents only a single grain of salt in a hugely festering wound of discrimination, a wound from which our society must once and for all really heal itself. With just a dash of pride he also realizes that the next generation, led by offspring such as his who are truly neutral to race, color, gender, and even age, will perhaps finally erase discrimination from the face of the earth. And that will be a glorious day, whatever the year.

We truly hope for a better world for our children, a world free of bigotry and hatred. Looking back over the last five decades, we clearly made significant progress. But still there are lemons. We need a pail and some water...