PuddleMonkey

Okay, nevermind the title. I’ve always been a liberal. It’s in my blood. I am the child of bed-wetting liberals. At one time, my mother believed in abortion at any time for any reason, and my father was a radical who ran around New York with the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin throwing firecrackers into protest parades.

Of course, I share many of my parents’ beliefs. That’s to be expected. Aside from my their liberal political leanings, perhaps the most important lesson they taught me is that tolerance is an ethic. I’m grateful for their point of view, not just because it enabled me to understand other people’s perspectives and experiences, but also because it helped me to cope with with one of the strangest experiences of my own life.

So here’s the short version of my story: on a bright but cold day in January in 1988 (MLK Jr’s birthday, to be exact), five “skinheads” beat the snot out of me. I suppose it’s fair to say I received a pretty nasty thrashing–in addition to being stabbed three times, my assailants also attempted to tattoo a swastika on my hip with the dull blade of a miniature Swiss Army knife (well, actually, it was the corkscrew, but that’s neither here nor there). As I lay in the dirt, my arms and legs pinned to the ground, one of my assailants licked my face and remarked that I was a bit to “raw” for his tastes. And then he quizzed me on my knowledge of Auschwitz, as if he hadn’t made his message perfectly clear. If you have not guessed by now, yes, I’m Jewish.

A healthy sense of humor certainly helped me heal, but I credit my strength in my beliefs for playing an even larger role. At the time of the assault, I was a teenager on a desperate search for self-identity, and I made the mistake of trying to define myself with a symbol, in this case the Star of David pendant I wore on a necklace. It enabled a lonely girl who had few friends to be the member of a large group that accepted me without forcing me to prove my value. It gave me hope, however false it may have been, that other people would recognize me as a person with whom they wanted to become friends. And for a group of skinheads, it marked me as a target.

That’s not to say I’m ashamed of being Jewish because I’m not. That’s not the point at all. An important part of the lesson I learned as a result of this experience is that self-identity is not something that can be captured in the clothes or jewelry we wear; it does not, in my view, take physical form. And for that reason I was able to consider the similarities I shared with my assailants, five teenage boys who turned to their matching black leather jackets, combat boots, and spiked wristbands for self-identity. I don’t excuse them, of course, but I do understand how powerful the desire to belong to a group can be, how the need for an easy-to-define self-identity can provide the motivation to say or do whatever one believes will win him or her favor with others.

I also strongly believe that if my parents had not engaged me in discussion, not exposed me to art, music, film and literature, not provided me with a greater cultural context in which to examine my own experiences, I would have suffered more emotional scars than physical ones, and I would not have had the ability to heal from any of them.

And that brings me back to the beginning (of this post, that is). During his administration, George W. Bush worked tirelessly to convince the nation that anyone who opposed his views was unpatriotic, a danger to the security and prosperity of the nation. And while a great many of us saw through Bush’s ridiculous rhetoric, he certainly persuaded a lot of his supporters to believe that open dialogue–a foundation of democracy and perhaps one of the most important tools for fighting hate–should not be tolerated. But that’s the mark of an ineffective leader, one who focuses all his attention on hating “evildoers” so much that most citizens don’t acknowledge problems in their own country, nor do they realize how badly they are being manipulated by their own leaders. Instead, they allow their government to think for them, and thus they learn to judge others according to the most superficial of terms: name, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.

I hope…I believe that Barack Obama will address and change the dialogue about hate in this country. He won’t shy away from discussion or criticism because he knows that to engage and change the culture in this country, he has to set the example–he has to learn from and about other cultures and people (rather than demonizing them), and he has to encourage every citizen in his own country to think freely so that they have the strength and support to escape the frame of reference to which they have become prisoner. Only then will they learn that tolerance is much, much more powerful than hate.