We are all horrified

---From a shared Facebook post by Jim Hightower

Once, in my early high school career, I joined a group of kids who decided to skip school and hang around someone's house listening to John Lennon's White Album, which had swears in it. Two of the members of this group had terrible reputations.

But I wanted to see what it was like to be a badass. 

I squirmed with guilt the minute I knew my first class was underway and nothing felt better until 2:15 when I could go home and stop feeling stupid and disappointing. 

My mother found out of course, and asked me why I'd done it. I told her I didn't know why. Then, in veiled teen speak, I asked if she thought I was stupid and disappointing. 

I might as well have asked her if I was not actually a human, but a mountain lion. 

"No," she said, mystified by this. "Of course not. Why would you think that?" 

She didn't patch a few facts together and pretend to know what was going on with me. She just loved me and wanted to understand. And, so, she asked me to tell her what she didn't know.

Some time later, I told her how much I liked talking to her because she always "understood." Actually, she told me, she didn't always, because her life and experiences were nothing like mine. But she always listened. 

The honesty of that distinction has been on my mind lately, with respect to the "Black Lives Matter"movement and the "All Lives Matter" response that appears to frustrate everyone. If I get this even a little, both sides have a different take on the meaning. The "All Lives" people see the slogan as divisive, while it is meant by "Black Lives" to suggest greater inclusion, a desire to have one's fair share too. Not more. Just as much.

But what I hear above the din, over and over again is a response I understand better than any: don't explain what you haven't experienced.

Jim Hightower's post on misunderstanding which appeared several times in my newsfeed recently appeals to me for its elegant truth:  We can differ in history or culture and other characteristics of identity - race, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin - and still  honor each other on common ground: we are human beings who love other human beings. 

Our children, and parents, and spouses, our family and friends.  

And we don't want to lose them. 

It isn't the inability to relate to the lives and loves of others that widens the divide. It is the inability to admit that you don't know more about a thing than you do, and failing to ask for enlightenment. It is failing to locate and honor that common ground where we share more than we don't.

Especially now. 
Because, now we share Dallas.

We are all horrified.

We were all horrified by Sandy Hook, and Oklahoma City and Orlando. 

And 9/11, the first time in my memory when the country, united by massive trauma, turned to itself for comfort, then fell to either side of our common ground in the month or so after, when, just as we were hoisting flags and listening to Lee Greenwood, some politician blamed another for "letting this happen," and there we were, united and polarized in crisis.

Here we are again, united and polarized by crisis, this time with a black, blue and white conflict at its core.  

However we dissect cause and effect, we are all horrified by the taking of lives not lived, people not at fault. We have all been left under a cloud of apprehension, a feeling of dread – where will the next one be? How bad? Who will die when an officer interprets a civilian's show of fear for his life as a threat to his own? What video will go viral?

I'm losing heart. Like others, I fear growing less horrified, and I dread the next crisis that will crowd this common ground with broken-hearted people. All different in ways that matter less than those in which we are exactly the same.  

I'm going to start with that.

I'm going to ask, I'm going to listen, I'm going to read, and I'm going to keep showing up at the humanity party as a life that does not matter more than any other.

Even if I wish I could do more.