THINGS AREN'T ALWAYS WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE!

In the middle of summer as my biking buddy and I rode along the southeastern edge of San Diego Bay, we came upon what appeared to be a winter scene. It was not a dusting of snow, but salt that covered everything; there were great piles of the stuff like drifts in a typical New England winter. With its deteriorating, rusting industrial buildings, the scene can only be described as bleak. The South Bay Salt Works plant would be a good setting for a movie about World War II concentration camps in winter.


































THE WAY I SEE IT

“There’s no such thing a being a little bit pregnant.” A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “A diamond is forever.” “A good man is hard to find.” “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.” It ain't necessarily so. Old sayings may be useful for cutting through a lot of talk to get right to the point of an issue or an argument; but often a catch phrase, like “being a little bit pregnant,” implies a world of absolutes. In the real world, very few things are absolutely, forever and all time, what they appear to be.

I remember showing my senior class list for a new school year to one of my colleagues, a teacher in my department who taught juniors; she pointed to one of the names and said, “Watch out for him. He’s a bad one.” The kid turned out to be one of my best students that year. It’s true that he was initially cross and suspicious. It would have been easy not to like him. He expected me not to like him. Early in the first week of school when I told him I liked something he had written, he said, “Really! Why?” I told him why I liked it and said I looked forward to learning more from him about the subject he had chosen. A few years later I got a telephone call from him telling me that he was teaching English in a college in Texas.

After years of teaching and observing adolescent and adult behaviors, I am convinced that in almost all matters of belief, orientation, attitude and behavior, all of us live somewhere on a continuum between two extreme points; and almost nobody exists always at one extreme or the other. In matters of politics, we choose where on the continuum we establish ourselves. On the political continuum between extreme liberalism and extreme conservatism, It's not unusual for an individual to choose a political position alongside parents or other influential persons in a social group. In some matters we are constantly shifting positions, moving from one place on the continuum to another. However, some orientations are apparently fixed, assigned in mysterious, probably biological ways that will one day be explained by science. Exhaustive research has shown that sexual orientation, for example, is not chosen. All of us are scattered along a continuum between homosexuality and heterosexuality, many apparently somewhere near midpoint.

In matters of choice, it’s not always clear how or why an individual adopts particular attitudes and behaviors. It’s not always clear why liars, cheaters, and thieves choose to lie, cheat, and steal. Sometimes behaviors are plainly selfish. On the other hand, a lie may be told to protect another person. Most people agree that murder is wrong. Most of us readily agree that killing another person is on the extreme “wrong” side of the continuum between “wrong” and “right” behaviors. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, a theologian and pacifist, became a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism. He became involved in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. He was arrested in March 1943, imprisoned, and eventually hanged just before the end of World War II in Europe.

We often judge the rightness or wrongness of the behaviors of others without knowing their whole story. When in the course of my ordinary, everyday, going-about-my-own-business experience of living, the events of a week or a day or even a moment converge, or coincide, around an issue, it occurs to me that I ought to direct my full attention to it. I recently had the privilege of visiting with one of my favorite relatives. He is the son of my brother, a brother who disappeared completely from the family circle when this nephew was a child. None of us knew where my brother had gone. No one knew how to contact him. He had left a note saying we should not try to find him because to do so might endanger the family. We tried anyway, but without success. He was just gone. He was gone from our lives for almost twenty years. Happily, he is now back in the family. Some in our family were glad to welcome him. Others were not so eager. What’s the problem? My brother is gay. He didn’t become gay twenty-five years ago. He has always been gay. It wasn’t a “lifestyle” (I don’t like the expression) he decided to adopt. It wasn’t a matter of lifestyle at all. For him it was a matter of personal survival.

It is fair to ask why he couldn’t have come to terms with who he was/is where he was twenty-seven years ago. One might ask why he thought he couldn’t work it out with his family and with his community. Why couldn’t he have said bravely, “This is who I am, and I need your help in coming to terms with it”? Why did he need to disappear so he could reinvent himself in another place? Why couldn’t he have said, “I am gay... Help me to live among you, the people I love, as a gay man”?

I asked myself those questions for several years after he came back into our lives. I now understand that my questions implied that there was something wrong with him and not with any of us. Now I know that the problem lies with all of us. He didn’t drop everything and everybody and walk away from something that we would have helped him bear. He knew in 1980 what many unfortunate gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons knew in those days... that they would be pariahs among the people they loved and especially in their church communities if they “came out” to them. I cannot judge my brother for the decision he made simply to disappear. I am just glad his life is once again connected with mine.

What’s the point? I want to be careful before I judge someone to be “right” or “wrong,” before I declare someone to be “good” or “bad.” Sometimes things aren’t at all what they appear to be. As a matter of fact, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it may not be a duck at all. And also as a matter of fact, there's nothing wrong with being a duck if it is a duck.