All kinds of people...

One of the things that I'm grateful for about my life is that I have lived in several diverse regions of this country.  At this point, I've pretty much got the four corners of the continental US states covered, although I haven't been right up to the very edge of them, and I've lived in the midwest and the midsouth.   I've lived and taught among the urbanized of NYC and I've lived and taught among the rural people of a small TN town. 

I was raised in a northern state by parents who were raised on farms in TN.  I sorta felt like a girl without a country most of my life.  My "yankee" classmates would make fun of the food my family ate and call me KayBelle and it seemed my southern cousins didn't know much what to do with their northern kin.  And then the same for the southerners I studied beside in my college years.  

But I really love them all.  I love the fast pace and sharp edges of some people from the north.  I love the slow pace and cornbread and beans of some southerners.  I cringe when either side mocks the other.  I hate when the media mocks the Palin family for their backwoods hunting ways.  First of all, leave the family alone.  And second, just deal with her politics, please!  But politics is not what I want to discuss here.  I just wish people would stop mocking others because their way of life is different.  No one is better than anyone else because they choose to get their exercise from chopping wood instead of jogging around the country in a fancy running suit.

I caught myself the other day passing judgment on a woman and man who walked into the restaurant and sat down at a table across the room from us.  They were rugged outdoors looking --- but not flashy LL Bean types.  She had on big ol' glasses and I'll just stop there.  I scolded myself and confessed my "sin" to my husband.  I wondered what the uptown folk of NYC (and all those who mock the Palins' rootin' tootin' shootin' culture) would say about this couple.  And what a shame that would be.  And what a shame that I thought what I did.  There's no reason that this man and woman couldn't be the sharpest tools in the shed, love each other and be enjoying the life that they live.  Shame on me!

This is a big ol' country and I'm happy to have been a part of a lot of it.  Why can't we all just get along?