To this day, nobody can tell which side threw the first punch. That “rumble” at my high school came as no surprise; two rival groups of students (the druggies squaring off against the Black kids) crowded into an outdoor patio area during a break between classes. When you add a wave of frisky Spring Fever to all us teenage dumbbells, the trash talking led to some non-genius shoving the other group. Stretching my memory all the way back to my senior year in high school gets hazy.
Even though nobody got hurt, the high school administration leaped into action. They launched a Reconciliation Board (?) made up of all the stakeholders throughout the school (back when “stakeholder” was not yet a thing). The school principal and the teachers invited me to represent the student body at large. “Pancho, we picked you because you’re friends with all the groups here: the academic nerds, the athletes, the preppies, the party guys, and all the races and languages in this school.”
That episode way back then tells the story of my life, and why not?! You couldn’t ask for a better family history to launch me into a life of building bridges between different kinds of people. When my dad returned from World War II in the Pacific (Saipan, Okinawa, the Philippines), he regaled my brother and me with those and other stories of his travels for U.S.A.I.D., bumping along in the mountains of Afghanistan and then up in the Andes of Peru. My mom left her native Peru to graduate from high school in Washington, D.C., learning both English and the jitterbug and cha-cha-cha dance moves of that post-war era. I learned from them to cross language and race barriers to make new friends with new peoples who are the same as me – – on the inside!
Traveling with our parents taught us two boys what it means to cross over a racial divide and to connect with another culture. They always chuckled in re-telling the story of how pre-school me corrected a U.S. Army captain when he mispronounced commands to our Korean bus driver who was returning us from a shopping trip to downtown Seoul back to our home on the military base. Our years in Rio de Janeiro impressed upon me the innate joy across the economic strata and the wide racial spectrum of the Brazilian people. Can you say, “Opa!”?
When we moved to live in the Washington, D.C., clambering all over Civil War battlefields taught me to revere the noble ideals and sacrifice of countless heroes that undergird our American Heritage. ♪” Oh beautiful, for patriot dream that sees beyond the years…” ♪ When we moved to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, it made me question my superior attitude toward the local people. “Hmm, these Dominican kids around here are regular guys, same as me. Besides, they can whup us in baseball!”
I’ll cut this autobiography off here at the 5th grade mark, but you get the idea – I was raised from earliest years to stretch myself outward to connect with people different from me, always trusting that our same Creator wants all His children to live together in harmony.
Building bridges across any divide takes a lot of work; you have to value the benefit of investing time and resources that leads to a better situation after the work is done. Our effort, sacrifice, and strain become lighter when we value the communication and the growth that lies ahead of us when our shared labors succeed. Connecting with people from a different background, value system, language, and mindset is a skill that takes time to learn, but you can make a difference (whether “big” or “small”) from right where you live, among the people you already contact all the time. It always delights me to find that many of those “other” people on “their side” want to connect with us on “our side.”
“So, what would happen if we don’t help these new neighbors adjust to our American way of life? What if we don’t teach Americans how to connect with our new neighbors? Things will work out over time, just like with previous waves of immigrants throughout our history.” This is precisely the danger to our American way of life going forward. Beyond the majority of people of good will (from whatever country, language, religion, or political view) coming here for a better future, there is a smaller, but very deliberate and successful, group who wants to cloud the public discussion with misunderstanding, who inflame the already existing resentments, who profit from keeping America divided, each one of us isolated among “our own kind.” All you have to do is take a look around the USA and right around here to find where the upset and turmoil exist and why.
Rapid change is happening all over the world, and also right here at home. Formerly distant groups of people are now on the move showing up on the doorstep of wealthy and more stable countries in search of a better future, whether we like it or not. The question before us is whether our country, our communities will emerge from all this change more unified and strengthened or more disconnected and suspicious of outsiders to their group.
Building Bridges USA exists to equip both newcomers and citizens to better understand and connect with one another, and to “co-exist” in the same communities, schools, and congregations. Welcome!
26 From one man, He made all the nations,
that they should inhabit the whole Earth; …
26 God did this so that they would seek Him,
and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him,
though He is not far from any one of us.
28 ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’
As some of your own poets have said,
‘We are his offspring.’
~ Acts 17:26-28