Unless you have one of those jobs that takes every federal holiday off, you may have missed the one that just happened yesterday. Columbus Day, also known as Indigenous Peoples Day, commemorates Christopher Columbus’s landing on San Salvador in October of 1492, an event that changed the world forever. Those are the basic facts, stated as neutrally as possible. Beyond that, things get complicated. The very fact that the day has two different names reflects this complexity. An old telling of the holiday has Columbus “discovering” the “New World,” while recent years have drawn attention to the fact that people had lived here for hundreds of years before Columbus showed up with his weapons and germs, thank you very much. To this day, Spain celebrates Columbus Day as the most patriotic holiday on their calendar, while here in the US, the day goes by with a certain amount of ambivalence. What makes this holiday so complicated is that it commemorates one of the first times in history that true strangers encountered each other for the first time. Think back to European history. They fought at length, but they were family. The wars between Europe and the Middle East? Those were over religions that trace back to the same family. The wars within the Middle East? Same story, different version. Alexander the Great’s sweeping wars of conquest? The people in those countries at least had an inkling he was coming. Pre-Colombian wars in the Western Hemisphere were much the same way. Up until Columbus crossed the Atlantic, feuds and relationships happened between people who already had at least some point of connection to give them context. Now, the world has grown much, much smaller and we find ourselves living alongside strangers every day. We encounter them on the internet and face-to-face. In talking about cultural backgrounds for Thanksgiving growing up, I was always a little envious of those who knew what their ethnic origins were and had a clear cultural identity--Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Italian, whatever--because I am a straight-up mutt produced by centuries of mixing and have very little European cultural identity left. I’ve absorbed more Mexican culture from living in Los Angeles over half my life than I’ll ever know about the Ukrainian culture of my nearest immigrant ancestors. What I appreciate about this, though, is that this rootlessness makes me self-aware about being a stranger when talking to almost everyone else. Think about it. There are many factors that affect the way we see the world, and culture is one of them. Gender, language, family, and religion are also immensely important. When talking to strangers, especially on the Internet with no context, it’s very easy to misunderstand each other and build assumptions about the other person through the lens of our own experience. This problem is intensified by the kind of communication the pandemic has forced us all into. A floating head on Zoom gives less context than a face-to-face encounter. Text-based communication is the worst, as it is very easy to misunderstand without cues like tone of voice. The absolute worst is text-based communication on social media with people we barely know, where there is no prior relationship to act as a frame of reference. How do we overcome this? With a good deal of patience, energy, and time. We must take time to ask questions. We must take time to clarify what we don’t understand. Especially when language and translation issues might be involved, it can be easy to take offense when what is said isn’t what is meant. Most uncomfortably for those of us whose cultures or families favor indirect or even passive-aggressive forms of communication, we need to be politely direct and willing to restate our own point of view in words that the other will understand. Is every encounter worth this kind of energy? Of course not. There are many, many conversations on Facebook not worth engaging in. But if you are struggling with a complicated relationship with a family member, a co-worker, or a friend--someone you need or want a healthy relationship with--it’s worth the effort to seek out your shared humanity. Whatever point of contention may have driven in a wedge is only one element of this person, and there may be another point of connection. Furthermore, the point of contention may be solvable through patience and mutual attempts at understanding the other person’s side. Will the damage done by explorers like Columbus ever be undone? No. (Many of the explorers who followed him were worse.) But those encounters also left behind the beautiful gift of diversity, which may complicate things, but also brings beautiful new experiences to us all. Every culture on the face of the planet has strengths and weaknesses, and the ability to sit down and sift through what we can learn from each other builds a better, stronger future for all.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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