Birds of a Feather is a small painting by Jim Rabby owned by my Daughter Nancy. It was the piece that a magazine chose many years ago to represent his work when it did a story about him.

It’s early Sunday morning as I write this entry into my journal. My old internal clock thinks it’s ten o’clock in the morning, and it is that time in Edinburgh where I woke up yesterday. This morning I got up and made coffee and went out to Nancy’s back porch to watch fireflies and listen to the birds and to continue the thinking that I was doing for the hour before I finally decided it was no good staying in bed trying to pretend it was only five o’clock. I’m writing in the room in Nancy’s house where the Birds of a Feather painting hangs; so my thoughts go right back to what I was thinking before I got out of bed.

With fireflies flickering and birds singing, the world is a marvelous place; but it’s also a terrifying place for birds and people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was a tourist for the past couple of weeks. I like being a tourist. Some people say they try not to look like a tourist when they are in a “foreign” place. I’m old enough to have given up trying to hide the fact that I am who I am wherever I am. On my way down in the elevator at the Apex European Hotel (how touristy is that) yesterday morning, a young, bleary-eyed, drunken Irishman clutching a freshly opened bottle of beer smiled at Margaret and me and said, “You’re American aren’t you?” We are obviously American. Europeans can probably tell by the way we walk down the street or the way we stand in an elevator. The young man and I had chatted in the bar before dinner the night before when he explained that he and his mates had brought their soon-to-be-married friend over from Ireland for the customary stag night. At four o’clock yesterday morning the party was still going. I asked if he’d had a good time. He said he didn’t remember.

The way I see it is clearly not the way the people who live in a place see it. For the tourist, and tourists usually have enough in the way of necessary resources to keep distance and retreat if a situation becomes uncomfortable, diversity is entertaining. According to slick travel brochures, diversity is at the top of the list of reasons people travel. Diversity is what we go to see, and we try to make ourselves believe that we, along with Rick Steves, experience what the people who live there experience. It ain’t necessarily so.

For the people who live in the middle of it, diversity is often a disaster. Outside of American there is no better place I know than Great Britain and Ireland to demonstrate that in the past and at the present time diversity is a huge problem. (Don’t get me wrong. I like diversity... but I also know about myself that I am at least a bit perverse. The dictionary says about perverse: “((of a person or their actions)) showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable, often in spite of the consequences.”) Lowlanders and Highlanders, Protestants and Catholics, Campbells and McDonalds, English and Irish, English and Scots... and as people from Asia and Eastern Europe move into Great Britain the list grows. A lowlander Scot wearing his tartan as trousers told me he had never worn a kilt and would never wear one. He also said we probably were all wondering what Highlander men wear under their kilts... nothing... and that a Highlander in the “service” who was caught wearing underwear under his kilts was punished (I didn’t ask but wondered who was checking). In Ireland and Scotland tourists are driven through spectacular countrysides made more “picturesque” by burned out, tumbled-down ruins of churches... places of worship destroyed by Christians of only slightly different faith persuasions unable to tolerate the “other” way of seeing and knowing God. Wow! How crazy is that! And there was that famous “Massacre of Glencoe” in Scotland when in the early morning of February thirteenth, 1692, the men of the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe were killed by guests who had accepted their hospitality... all because the MacDonalds had not pledged allegiance to the new king, William of Orange.. and just for good measure the Campbells burned MacDonald homes leaving forty women and children to die of exposure. The Clachaig Inn, popular with climbers and some tourists, has a sign on its door saying “No Hawkers or Campbells.” The feud goes on.

And don’t forget the Battle of Culloden on the 16th of April, 1746, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands when the Jacobite forces of Charles Edward Stuart were pitted against an army loyal to the British government. As many as 2,000 Jacobites were killed or wounded and 50 were killed and 259 wounded on the government side. Apparently the government kept better records of who was there and what happened to them. Keeping records is something government is good at...

And how about that famous potato famine in Ireland... the population dropped by around 25 percent when a million Irish died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated. The issue wasn’t just a potato blight but a host of political, social and economic factors that leave the English, who mostly ignored the Irish suffering, in a pretty bad light. Neither side has got over it even to this day.

For this writing, I’ll leave the Battle of Gettysburg and the Stonewall riots on our side of the pond and all that unpleasant stuff started by Hitler and Stalin for another day. Enough already of reminders that we don’t do diversity very well.

And another thing... Nancy’s cat Lucky, the one in yesterday’s photograph, doesn’t like me. In fact he doesn’t like men. I’m working on it but making very little progress. Maybe I should take the case to Judge Judy.
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