out of place

Last summer at a wedding, I reconnected with a friend from high school who turns out to live in the east bay. I was delighted to find that he lives here, as he was one of the people I grew up with who I knew I'd always feel at home with. What might seem funny about that to some of you is that it's not something I can say about most people I know from home. On the one hand, I always enjoy the rare chance to catch up with people I hardly know now but once did. I went to the same school for 13 years, and my classmates there were my world until I left for college; even the ones I wasn't close friends with I certainly knew, inevitably being in a class or some extracurricular together at some point in all that time. But there is part of me that always felt that they and I were from different camps, different worlds. Their parents were southern, mine weren't; their parents were loaded, mine weren't; their parents were Republicans, mine Democrats; their parents were born-again Christians, Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, but all Christian, while mine were Jewish by heritage and raised outside of any faith; their fathers were wealthy doctors and lawyers, mine a comparatively poor professor; their mothers were at home all day, or driving carpool, or providing snacks, while mine was at work until dinnertime, inspiring all kinds of unsubtle disapproval from the rest. I grew up in a homogeneous environment, and in it I looked and seemed no different than anyone else. But I felt the differences. My mindset was different, my world view and my belief system centered around completely different foundations than theirs.

So when my friend across the bay emailed me today to tease me about how many more people from our school had befriended him on facebook than had me, to tease me about his being connected on the web to some of my best friends from high school when even I wasn't, I decided to have a look at who is on facebook from that part of my life. As it turns out, most of the few friends I've stayed in touch with since leaving Atlanta have profiles, including one of my closest friends from high school—closest back then and closest now, which surprises me every time I see or talk with her because we could not feel more oppositely about things like George Bush, Adam and Eve, and the Georgia Bull Dogs (she went to UGA; my dad was a professor at Tech; if you've ever been to Atlanta, you understand this rivalry to be no different than Duke/UNC, Yankees/Red Sox, Cal/Stanford, etc., and if you've ever met this friend, you understand this rivalry to be an important part of life).

The schism between our thinking on such things is something we have always known about and never let matter; we had a great time together as teenagers and that's what we hold on to; that's what keeps us loving each other, no matter the differences in our lives' paths. That being said, it was still a shock to open her profile and see Republican listed under Politic Views, to see a John McCain banner running across the page.

My friend in the east bay had mentioned in his email to me that he did think accepting all these friends requests had made his profile significantly more bipartisan than he'd ever expected; and mine will head that way now too, and that's fine; when you've grown up the one who's different, you know better than to hold difference or disagreement against anyone else. But as I typed back to him my surprise, despite all preparation for it, at seeing her support for McCain right out there in public, I realized how cozy it has been spending the last 13 years of my life living in two of the most liberal places in the country—how cozy it has been being surrounded by people with views relatively similar to mine. The debates among my friends from both college and all the lives I've led since give color to the different gradations of liberalism; but other than having a very conservative college roommate, I've been sheltered all these years from non-liberal mindsets in the very same way that the majority of my classmates in Atlanta were sheltered from liberal ones.

That is to say, I've been in a bubble. And while I greatly appreciate that so many people see the world roughly as I do, that moment of shock reminded me of the importance of not just knowing that people see the world in different ways but also understanding how others see it—and why. The lack of that understanding has been a source of great animosity in our history and in our world today. So for all my discomfort with coming from a world full of people who believe certain things with ferocity, I remind myself to refrain from judging them and instead just listen to them. That is, after all, one of the great benefits of being out of place; you come to fully know something that is not yours.