Hi Everyone,

I first posted this several years ago – I’m now 78 years old. I am reposting this today July 1, 2015, because it seems appropriate given current events.

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I am 76 years old. I grew up in the segregated south of the 30s and 40s and 50s. I attended “separate but equal” schools that were separate but not at all equal. I was in high school when the decision was made to desegregate the schools.

In the 70s and 80s I was teaching at the college level. We only had a few black students in our formally white college and many of them had a very difficult time because they had attended the separate but very unequal black schools.

I remember one man in particular who was bright and hard working but found the work challenging because of his educational background. One morning he was waiting for me when I arrived at my office. He said he had not slept all night, that he had a gun in his car, and that he was going to shoot one of the other students but wanted to talk to me first.

The night before as they were leaving their evening class the other student had called him “boy.”

He said he had scars on his back from a man in a white robe who had called him boy.

The other student, a much younger white student, had no idea what this mean to the older black student.

I considered calling security but knew this student who had come to talk to me would be long gone before they could arrive. So I talked and I talked.

Finally I got out the information card for the student who had called him boy and showed it to this student. The other student was much younger and had not even been born at the time of the racial conflict that had scarred the older black man more than physically. I was able to explain to him that the younger boy did not understand what it meant to call him boy. That he did not understand –  he had not even been born then.

He calmed down and went on his way. No one got shot. He went on to graduate and got a good job in Washington DC. I may have saved two lives that morning.

In listening to the president’s speech today about the reality of black boys today I thought of the very different realities of these two students. They saw the situation through very different filters.

I hope we can all remember that we do not all have the same experiences and as a result we do not see the world in the same way. We have come a long way since the days of my childhood and we have a long way to go.

I see things coming up for clearing – old wounds that need to be released for the healing of all of us. Let’s view the various events taking place as old wounds up for healing and allow them to heal in our minds and hearts. As we heal ourselves we heal the world because this is a holographic universe and we are all One.