Stop and Think

When you were a child, how might you have describes on "ordinary" person? What family structure would the person have? What skin color? What home language? What would be their work and economic class? Where and how would they have lived?

I can honestly say until I moved south at the age of eight I probably never saw anyone as different from me. Or maybe I was just so unaware I did not know that there were differences. However, when I moved south and we went to southern public schools my view of people changed. Not because of the differences in skin color, which I do not believe effected me as much as the poverty that I saw. I truly lived in a sheltered community (gated). My brothers and I were of the very few who took the bus to school, much less a public school. I learned later we were picked up first because they would not allow "those" children in the gate. (Unless of course their family worked at the Club House.) I rode on the bus for almost two hours, through Pin Point a Gullah community in Savannah, Bethesda a home for boys, and various "trailer parks" along Moon River. Poverty was something I had never seen before, it was shocking. It did not seem to be a black or white thing, it just appeared to be everywhere on the way to school.

I have no idea what my peer's family occupations were but they were poor, especially compared to the world in which I had lived. They were families similar to my own but they had far less than I had. I believe it changed me and my view of life forever.