The wisdom of a child

I feel the urge to share a childhood memory.

I have two moments in my childhood that will be forever burned into my mind. I see them today as clearly and vibrantly as if they had happened just moments ago.

My father and I used to watch the CBS News together every night when I was a little boy in the late 1960's. I remember every night seeing the flags of North Vietnam and the United States and seeing numbers alongside each, tallying the total dead in that day's fighting. There was always a map of the country of Vietnam with a little "explosion" of where that days fighting had happened.

I remember asking my father the question "What are we fighting about?" And I remember just as vividly his answer, "I don't know."

I remember film, with Walter Cronkite's voice describing people of color being blasted with water cannons, attacked by dogs, beaten by police with clubs. I remember hearing Walter Cronkite say that such things were happening because a black man had decided to sit at a lunch counter and have dinner with other men.

I remember asking my father, "Why can't black people eat with white people?". And I remember just as vividly his answer, "I don't know."

For a history teacher, my father obviously didn't know very much.

I do remember reassuring him on this occasion, saying as only a naive seven year old boy could say, "Well one day I'm going to own a restaurant and I'm going to let anybody eat in it who wants to."

I remember his smile. I also remember he didn't say a word. At that time I didn't know that my father had been through that horror personally. He played on a college baseball team that had black players on their roster. On trips they had been denied service at many restaurants they had stopped at because of their team mates. I am proud to say that my father's team left those restaurants without eating.

For me I simply found the whole thing completely baffling. As a child I could honestly see no difference between a black person, a yellow person, a purple person or a white person. People were people. It is still a struggle for me to understand a fear of another person for any reason.

As I have become older I begin to realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. We are involved in a senseless war overseas that claims fathers, sons and husbands everyday, for no good reason. We claim to be rid of our prejudice, but the simple truth is that we just hide it better and have found other recipients for that scorn.

I find myself wondering just exactly what Dr. King would think of this world today. Would he feel that we have advanced at all 40 years later?

I wonder what would happen if we could all have the innocence of a child, and I realize what Jesus meant when he said that only a child could enter the kingdom of heaven.