BACK TO THE BEGINNING
My 5th grade teacher's social studies experiment went a little like this: she broke us up into small groups and handed each group a stack of cards. Each card contained an ethically based question. You would draw a card, read it to yourself, choose a member of your group that you thought would most likely respond "Yes" or "No" to your question, and would then write down, on a piece of paper, what you thought that person's response would be.
When another student read his card, and directed his question at me, I felt a sort of anxiety I've seldom experienced in the years since.
"If you were an elementary school principal, and a student wanted to enroll who was HIV-positive, would you allow him or her?"
I honest-to-God felt my pulse quicken. My soul split into a million directions. The neurons in my brain were simultaneously processing every bit I'd heard on the news regarding the illness.
Before you judge me too harshly for even being at all conflicted -- rather than shouting a resounding "YES!" -- you should know a few things about the timeline:
HIV and AIDS were still very new to the public limelight. Treatments were highly experimental, and people weren't living for decades with medication (but rather were dying slow and painful deaths).
We weren't yet sure how it was transmitted. Sexually and through blood contact, sure, but there were still whispers of saliva, sweat, tears, sneezes, coughs and even mosquito bites.
This all occurred just a couple towns over from the school district that had shunned Ryan White a few years prior. And so: while internally I felt an abundance of empathy with what I witnessed first-hand, the world around me was awash with rumors and fear.
I couldn't choose. I told my classmate that there were a lot of factors at play, and I'd really need more information on how the virus is transmitted. But in the end, I couldn't dance around the issue. I couldn't offer a "grey" answer.
"It's yes or no," he reminded me.
I repeated my distaste for having to choose, but said that in the interest of "protecting" the other students until we knew more about how you "catch it," my response was "no."
It was a decision I immediately regretted.
I cannot forget the look on my classmate's face, even after all of these years, as he showed me the piece of paper where he'd written down, "She'll say yes."
"If there was anyone at this school who would've said 'yes,' I thought it'd be you," he said.
He looked at me for a moment, a quiet disappointment on his face, and a silence fell between us.
I was ashamed.
It was truly a pivotal moment in my life, and I decided -- then and there -- to always strive to err on the side of kindness, even in the face of fear.
Because, more often than not, it is the right thing to do.
AND SO IT GOES
I haven't always succeeded, to be sure. I am more sinner than saint, and live every day in conflict between who I am, and who I want to be. But I never lose sight of the latter and that, I think, is perhaps most important.
It's an idea that screams at me now. This desire to do something more, to help people, to make the world a better place.
I've felt it every time I've read about a Syrian refugee losing their life when trying to escape their war-torn county. I felt it when, last Friday morning, I read about a bombing in Baghdad. And then again when I was reading about a similar attack in Beirut. I was reading about the 40+ lives lost there when the article vanished from the front page, and was replaced with stories regarding the series of attacks unfolding in Paris..
The feeling deepened, my heart transported across the ocean and delivered to the people of France.
And I feel it now, no less strongly than last Friday, as I see governors around the United States (what is it now? 27?) closing their doors to Syrian refugees -- for fear that one might be a terrorist in disguise.
I understand their fear. I have felt that fear.
And it disgusts me.
GIVE ME YOUR TIRED
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
