Resolution

“Ha luh a ghay!” I call into the microphone.

“Good Afternoon,” Eh Kaw echoes into his mic next to me.

He launches into a rapid Karen explanation of the petition we are asking everyone to sign for Derek Mitchell, the ambassador the United States recently appointed to Burma subsequent to Hillary Clinton’s visit. People are spread across the gymnasium like a fan, decorated with multicolored garments, many red, blue, and white, the colors of the Karen flag. Around the edge of the fan, the remaining space is packed with standing spectators. It is the Karen New Year celebration in Clarkston, and this year, the year 2750, the turnout is larger than ever before, with five hundred or six hundred people in attendance.

“…Tablu,” Eh Kaw finishes his speech and walks off the stage, leaving me standing by myself, hoping that I tied my longyi tight enough that it will not fall off as I stumble through this unanticipated bout of public speaking.

“The United States has not had diplomatic relations with Burma for some time now, but following Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the country, we appointed an ambassador by the name of Derek Mitchell. A Karen woman in Washington, D.C., created a petition charging him to meet with ethnic minority leaders and not only the central Burmese government and in spite of reforms, to respond to the unceasing violence in the ethnic areas. We have the original version of the petition designed for resettled refugees from Burma to sign, with copies in Karen and Burmese, as well as a modified version for American citizens to sign over there at the table on the side. Thank you.”

The words flowed from my mouth with only one or two interruptions of “umm.” With no preparation or warning that I would have to mount the stage to speak about this, I am amazed that I did not stammer through the whole thing with a mess of nonsensical phrases. I descend the temporary stairs to the hardwood gym floor feeling the weight drop from my chest as I flee the spotlight. My shoulders relax and I know a deep peace. “The words came as I needed them,” I realize.

One of the most important things I have gleaned from Karen culture is intentionality submersed in the unpredictability of experience. There are few certainties in the lives of many Karen, and so decisions are typically made quickly. Structures are built within a day. Marriages take place after less than a year of courtship. Deliberation takes on a different shape when you are not in control of your own time.

I come from a culture where planning is essential for survival. Your planner quickly fills up with appointments. People have lengthy meetings to discuss future possibilities. With the luxury of stability and infrastructure, we tend to think of these plans as concrete realities rather than visions for the future. But it is precisely in vision: anticipation rather than expectation, that intentionality finds its proper expression. Vision is the coalescence of collective values and circumstances. It unravels our sense of entitlement, whether to pleasure or suffering, and transforms our present reality.

Vocation finds its place only within the realm of vision. The word “vocation” when it first came into usage in the 15^th century referred to “a spiritual calling.” It came from the Latin verb, vocare, which means “to call” and shares its etymology with the word “voice.” To find one’s vocation is to find one’s voice in the choir of creation. However, this concern becomes largely irrelevant if vision, or corporate vocation is neglected. Cacophony quickly takes over if everyone is using their voices in service of themselves and fails to engage in the larger vision. Culture collapses because there is no longer a cult in which it can be cultivated. Isolation and despair wave their batons to conduct the dirge of fear. We are left with the challenge to listen for overtones of hope in the discord.

I stand behind the long folding table as people pour over to sign the petition. Eh Kaw and I spread sheets across the table so that four people can sign at once. The petition for American citizens to sign receives some attention as well with the surprisingly large number of gaw lah wahs in attendance. Several people ask me what organization I am with or what kind of work I do.

“Umm….”

Eh Kaw leans over and tells me, “You work for the Karen!”

“I am with the Karen?” I reply hesitantly, and then go on to talk about my work as a tutor, my “freelance social work,” and my background at Jubilee Partners. I wish that I could have an easy answer to this question, but it seems as though my answer is becoming more and more complex.

What do you do? This question is thrown around so much and I am as complicit as anyone in this, but how often does it become a bastion of performance-based esteem? We must recognize this as the demon of despair, which is forcing us to define ourselves in convenient categories as though to show our resume to each acquaintance. Vocation takes on a different connotation when many of your close friends labor tirelessly in poultry plants in support of our abandoned sense of vision. Vocation is indeed what we do, but it is what we do with our whole lives, not out of concern for financial security.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt. 13:44 NRSV). We recover the fullness of vocation when we give the entirety of our livelihood in pursuit of an ordinary field, its grasses waving wildly. Such a field would be perfect for grazing, but without any leftover money with which to purchase livestock, we must simply lie down beneath that ancient Oak standing strong and lonely in the pasture, and rest in the quiet joy of knowing we have found treasure.

Sweet December

I tape one end of a thin strip of red, white, and green striped wrapping paper to the hula-hoop for Wonderful Htoo, pleased to discover that it coils nicely around the gift. I look down to see that I have only covered a small fraction of the hoop and realize how long this process will take. Why not just give it to him? He’ll throw away the paper instantly! The thought fires in my mind that this is incredibly inefficient, a waste of time. This thought is quickly defeated however by the meticulous and absurd pleasure of winding strip after strip of paper around the blue plastic hoop, the rhythmic task somehow saving me from the inner grinch.

There is a Karen holiday known as “Sweet December” which is something like American New Year, but for the month of December. Traditionally, Karen people stay up all night on November 30 to greet the sacred month of Jesus’ birth. People go from home to home, singing songs, exchanging gifts, and eating together. Baw Baw told me very excitedly about Sweet December several times: how enjoyable it was in the camp in Thailand and in Karen state, with sometimes even more festivities than Christmas itself. A friend recently told me that when she came here from Thailand, it was no longer Sweet December, but “December a kah,” Bitter December. Here, everyone stays inside and keeps to themselves, even her Karen friends. She still stayed up until midnight with her daughter to greet December 1^st in prayer though.

According to an article in the New York Times, 6.8 million mobile devices were activated on December 25, 2011, up from 2.8 million last Christmas. After families finished unwrapping their new gadgets, they went on to break records for app purchases, with 242 million downloads on Christmas Day. In the recesses of our memory is the incarnation of Christ, the human hope offered in the birth of a child. To set aside this day yet mark it with such practice is rolling our soul out like sugar cookie dough ready to be lacerated by that ugly Santa Claus cookie cutter that keeps appearing year after year. It is not difficult to imagine everyone sitting around on the couch Christmas day playing with new iPhones, while the turkey burns in the oven. No wonder “the most wonderful time of the year,” has come to breed such feelings of emptiness and hopelessness, when time spent with family becomes like time spent with zombies possessed by their new technology.

The more I learn about countering my tendency towards depression, the more I learn about the importance of rhythmic activities inviting me into mindfulness, recharging me in order to recognize the “bad thoughts” or “demons” that seek to pull me into despair if I follow them. We must acknowledge the desire to do away with or escape our holiday traditions as a “bad thought,” the same thought fueling the rampant consumerism and the distraction of mobile devices on a day set aside to remember our spiritual membership in the birth of the Christ child. The exchange of gifts is a sacred act, which though perhaps crushed to death under the weight of consumerism, can be revived through creative energy instead of credit cards. The holidays are meant to be a time of holy inefficiency when we eat together, give gifts to one another, sing together, and other activities which cannot be expedited by an iPhone.

Let us resurrect the miscarried infant Jesus by caroling in the streets, those same old songs that we sing year after year, declaring this as a time of joy, not concerned about offending the neighbors. This is the despair of relativism. I have a friend who often refers to “the tragedy of diversity,” which I think points to the truth that in diverse areas such as Clarkston, there is a brokenness that has brought all these people to this place from their homelands and an impending danger of losing their unique ethnic identities, boiling their culture alive in the melting pot. Diversity jargon and iconography often neglects this reality in favor of imagining peaceful coexistence. If the uninviting urban landscape of the apartment complex is keeping us from caroling or the iPhone is keeping us from real conversation, we must seek ways to recreate Sweet December.

Christmas is a time to remember who we are, for better or worse, to remember our origins, the places that have shaped and created us and to move forward with these memories fresh, as we engage a new year of life. Christmas may not always be a time filled with comfort and certainty, with the warm fuzzies of loved ones and familiar things all around. The first Christmas was spent much like many of my friends from Burma have spent many of their Christmases, fleeing persecution in makeshift shelters, separated from family, and uncertain of what is to come. But as I hear the stories of Christmas celebrations in the confines of the camps in Thailand, I cannot help but want to see the fullness of that joy at the birth of hope into the world here in my country, where we have succumbed to sloth with regard to so many of our traditions from caroling, to giving meaningful gifts and making holiday foods from scratch. These are the things that help us to remember who we are and why we are.
I rediscovered delight this Christmas in giving toys to my nieces and nephews, distributing a trunk full of live chickens, guineas, and rabbits as gifts, playing volleyball over a septic field at a Karen Christmas celebration in Vesta, and even caroling at one stranger’s house in Comer. We cannot rationalize this time of year, but must let it overtake us on our terms. Human beings are incredibly inefficient, and we commit corporate suicide when we deny the sanctity of this exuberant celebration with technologically facilitated isolation. Come together. December is sweet.

The Wolf

Dusk blends skeletal trees with the sky. The roar of Interstate 285 rushes through the empty spaces. Light pours from the porch light over the front lawn. This little brick house is not mine, but it feels so familiar. It is not strange that I am here, yet I do not know where I am. I step over the curb and walk into the yard. There are two cars in the driveway and a woman standing on the porch who must have just arrived home after a long day of work. She calls to me and I am unsurprised, but cannot make out her words.

The dogs, all puppies really, scamper about the yard playing with one another like little kittens. There is a brown dachshund, a beige cocker spaniel, and a gray one with icy blue eyes that glimmer in the porch light. The little dog with blue eyes looks directly at me. His gaze lingers sending a sudden shudder of fear through my body. “I think that one…” I start. Then he lets out a piercing high-pitched howl. He looks away and then his eyes meet mine again. I am captivated by the clarity. His pure blue eyes like translucent pools, his bark crisp and clean like a hymn, yet with a hint of what he might become if nothing gets to him first, which surely nothing will while he is being swaddled like a newborn by these people, in this house.

“My God,” I mutter under my breath. I try to speak again and say, “Not that one! I think that one is a wolf!” The woman is unfazed and opens the screen door, holding it open with her large backside, accentuated by her puffy black winter coat. I want to look her in the eyes and talk some sense into her before it is too late, but I cannot even see her face. It is as though she refuses to look at me. Her pudgy cream-colored hand turns the doorknob and the dachshund and the cocker spaniel race into the dark house. The little wolf turns again to look at me from the cement porch and lets out another yelp, slowly crossing the threshold as the woman coaxes him.

My eyelids slowly open to the darkness of my bedroom. Dawn diffuses through the purple and red batik curtains. I roll over and pull the blanket over my head, drifting carelessly back into oblivion.

Something came over me as I left Comer after the Thanksgiving holiday: a deep gratitude and a sharp sadness, yet a sadness one can take delight in, a sadness within the realm of joy. What an awesome relief to move away from the coldness of heart, the numbness of depression which has hung over me these past couple years. The whole ride back to the city, in the quiet of my car, I wondered at the warmness, the feeling of inseparable connection: the assurance that without any vows or monthly payments that I will always share a special love with this energetic family of six, soon to be seven, perhaps even eight. It may be a queer love, but I know it to be real.

Jesus teaches with clear and offensive words because he is not restrained by fear. Fear is what moves us into relativism and indecision. Surely, easy answers do not meet the complexity of suffering, but neither does language that mystifies its causes. For too long I have allowed myself to become lukewarm like the water around me. We live in a world governed by fear itself. Life is found in the visions that freeze and boil, which embrace the dynamism of ecstatic love.

On Sunday night I knew with a clarity I have not known in a long time, that I must go to Comer next year to continue this journey and that I must now finally out of love for my Karen brothers and sisters seek employment at the poultry plant. I tremble with fear at the thought of taking this step alone, but know this thought to be a fear-driven lie, which denies the reality of the spiritual friends I already have who are putting down roots in this bizarre little town where I find my search for God taking me. I will leave behind some of my best gaw lah wah friends in Clarkston by making this move, but I am subject to a spirit of exodus larger than myself, and know proximity can be motivated by fear just as much as love.

St. Francis of Assisi once stayed in the town of Gubbio where everyone feared a wolf that was terrorizing the town, killing animals and even people. Francis went out into the forest to meet the wolf one day. When the wolf saw Francis, he charged at him, but Francis calmly made the sign of the cross and he ceased. He spoke to the wolf, saying, “Come to me, Brother Wolf. I wish you no harm.” The wolf laid his head at the feet of St. Francis like a lamb. Francis negotiated peace between the people and the wolf and the wolf placed his paw in Francis’ hand in agreement. Then they walked through the town together while the people looked on shocked. From that day forward the people fed the wolf as he came to their doors. He lived the remaining two years of his life peacefully among the people of the town, loved by all.

While staying with Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw’s family in their new house over the Thanksgiving holiday, I was reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, one afternoon in the bedroom with the door closed. The door opened rather suddenly, and unsurprisingly, there stood Blay Blay Htoo with a slightly mischievous smile on his face.

“What you doing?” he asked, coming into the room.

“Reading. Do you want to read with me?”

He sat down on the floor next to me and leaned in to look at the page. I started reading out loud to him, “Body and soul constitute human nature. The body is not less good than the soul. In…” I stopped for a moment to cough and clear my throat.

Without pause, he helped me to the next word, “MOTORCYCLE!”

I glared at him as he offered me his usual flamboyant smile. The text continued, “mortifying the natural we must not injure the body or the soul,” but I decided to heed his suggestion and continue reading: “In MOTORCYCLE the natural we must not injure the body or soul. We are not to destroy but to transform it, as iron is transformed in the fire. Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to the angels.”

Halloween

The Holiness of No

“I cannot bring myself to say congratulations when I see one of my friends get married, because they haven’t done anything yet!” Chico preaches flamboyantly under a big tulip poplar at Jubilee Partners on a brisk November day. My friends Corey and Lauren sit at the front of those gathered, listening to this challenging wedding sermon. “Marriage is a call to suffering! It does not save us from ourselves as our culture supposes, but rather is a school for conversion in which to learn the way of love in a world so filled with violence.”

The monastic impulse can take on a variety of expressions, but it is something we all possess. Feelings of anxiety are often described as feeling “unsettled,” and what truth this speaks to our physical life and our need for stability and limits. The monastic impulse is a response to the unsettled feeling we all hold inside when things do not quite line up in our lives, when we functionally believe that we are without limits. This creed is so much a part of the culture in which I was raised. Parker Palmer captures it well when he writes, “Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are white and male, I was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort. The message was that both the universe and I were without limits, given enough energy and commitment on my part. God made things that way, and all I had to do was to get with the program.”

How often my thinking has fallen in that track and misplaced my agency as a human being. The monastery is the place where we settle. “Our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you,” St. Augustine writes in his Confessions. By placing the limits of place, people, and practice upon one’s life the voice of God, our vocation, becomes gradually clearer. The monastery is the place where we learn that our freedom comes from the confines of orthopraxy, the holy drone that becomes the foundation of the creative project of God speaking into our lives. The psalter sings to us: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Later in the afternoon I take Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw to look at a house in Comer, the small town where Jubilee is located. They have been eagerly anticipating moving here for months. A man from the local Baptist church is the landlord and comes over in his pickup to opens up a little white house behind the Kangaroo, the largest gas station convenience store in town. It is small but nicely finished inside with new carpet, freshly painted beige walls, and not a cockroach in sight. They look around for barely two minutes before nodding at me.

“Na hso ga mo dee leh—What do you think?”

“Ya hso ga mo bah—I think it is right.”

They sign a yearlong lease the next day and we plan the move for the next weekend. A deep joy unfurls inside of me knowing that my brothers and sisters will be in this quieter, safer place where they will be seen as people. Just the previous day I thought there would be no housing options here for them to look at as I had promised we would this weekend, but here they are to my surprise committing their lives here for the next year. Just a few blocks away in Comer, my friend Eh Kaw and his family recently purchased a home where they will soon move.

We often deny ourselves the things we need most. It is my Karen friends who are signing leases and putting down roots, while I wrestle with an eternal spiral of questions regarding vocation and relationships. Yet I desire to discern these things in community with my Karen friends working in poultry plants, most of who are married with several children, and offer a much different perspective. I want to crucify this white savior complex I possess and vanish into obscurity, embracing the holiness of “no.” At what point are we ready to say enough already, leave the world of the mind, lay down on the earth, and let the Kingdom rise out of our hearts and come into consciousness like a cloud shape?

I am staying with Lesley, a gracious friend who opened up her house in Clarkston to me while we are figuring out the next step.  Bernard and Amber, my friends from Jubilee who recently moved back to Georgia are staying there also. There are quite a few of us former Jubilee volunteers, now in the vicinity wondering what we are doing with our lives, most of us jobless, yet knowing there is life in our connection with the Karen people whom we know, knowing that there is something true growing in the places we inhabit.

I made the decision not to move to Comer with Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw at this time because of my own limits—my need for fellowship with my cultural peers, as unsettled and frustrating of a bunch as we might be. I am not the same person as when I moved in with Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw five months ago. I have learned courage and hope in the face of uncertainty from the love of their family. Baw Baw speaks much more English and I much more Karen now from countless hours of joking and conversing.

The first week living with gaw lah wah again, I purchase my first ever package of monosodium glutamate. Bernard and I go into Kroger together dressed in our Karen longyis. I will never be Karen, but my life speaks the desire to commit to this obscure ethnic group, to bring meaning to such jargon as “Christian” and “American” through a life together. 

Simple Living

“This month Georgia Power is too much!” Baw Baw says showing me the paper statement that just came in the mail. I look at the bill and am surprised to see double what they usually pay for one month. “Weh… too much!” I agree, “We did not turn on the heat or air.” There appears to be a remaining balance from the previous month.

“Did you pay last month?”

“Yes!”

“It says you didn’t pay last month.”

Baw Baw rummages through the file box I gave her and produces a money order receipt for the exact amount. I brace myself for another phone adventure of talking to robots, holding to fuzzy elevator music, and arguing with inept employees.

“Press two for billing…bawp…Press 1 for your current account balance, Press 2 to make a payment…Press 9 to speak with a representative…bawp. Doo boo dee bop shoo boo doo dee bop bop. Dee doo wop shop mop wee woo wop…”

“Hello, can I have your name please?”

“Yes, Zachary Cooke, but I am calling on behalf of your customer Hei Nay Htoo.”

“Can I speak with him?”

“He is not here, but his wife, Baw Baw, is here. She cannot speak very much English though.”

“I am sorry, but her name and your name are not on the account so I cannot discuss anything with you. You will have to call back later when he is available.”

“Really, his wife can’t speak with you?”

“No, he is the only name on the account.”

“He can’t speak English. Do you use language line?”

“Yes.”

“Ok. Thank you.” Click.

“GRAAAAAH! They can only talk with Wonderful Pa.”

“Mayahh?—Really?”

(Two days later)

“Press two for billing…bawp…Press 1 for your current account balance, Press 2 to make a payment…Press 9 to speak with a representative…bawp. Doo boo dee bop shoo boo doo dee bop bop. Dee doo wop shop mop wee woo wop…”

“Hello, how can I help you?”
“I am calling regarding my friend Hei Nay Htoo’s account, but I believe you have his name as HEL Nay Htoo.”

“Is he present, sir?”

“Yes, but he does not speak much English.”

“Ok. What language does he speak?”

“Karen. K-A-R-E-N. Not Korean.”

“Hold on just a minute while I get an interpreter on the line. Doo boo dee bop shoo boo doo dee bop bop. Dee doo wop shop mop wee woo wop… Ok, sir. I have the translator.”

I pass the phone to Hei Nay Htoo and he says hello. The faint murmur of the interpreter’s voice travels across the room. A perplexed look slowly encroaches upon Hei Nay Htoo’s face. The wrinkles intensify across his forehead as he shakes his head and passes me the phone.

“Na may pwa ga nyawahh—Are you Karen?”

“Sorry sir, this is Korean,” the woman’s voice says, “I’ll get a Karen interpreter on the line. Please hold.”

The interpreter evidently encountered this situation often enough that she could understand this Karen phrase. A Karen interpreter finally gets on the line and the Georgia Power agent confirms Hei Nay Htoo’s identity and gets permission for me to speak regarding the account. I explain that they paid last month, but were charged again this month.

“The payment was never received. It must have been lost in the mail. They have to send their payment before November 17^th or their power will be cut off.”

I turn to Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw who are looking at me intently.

“They never got it,” I say sullenly, “The mail man must have lost it. You have to pay again before November 17, or no more electricity.”

“Mayahh—really?” they say in unison. They discuss this in Karen for a while before Baw Baw to ask, “In Comer the same Georgia Power as here?”

“Yes. I think it is the same.” They discuss again.

Hei Nay Htoo slows his speech to ask, “Du pa leh luh Comer, pa duh a thaw a meh oo ta oh bah thayahh—When we go to Comer, can we not have electricity in our new house?”

A smile creeps across my face as I imagine them living in a carpeted and enclosed Western home as though it were a bamboo hut—the primitive occupation of our overly complicated society, an integral demonstration of simple living, Occupy Wall Street as second nature. Baw Baw says she can cook over a fire outside; they did like that in Thailand “No problem. We don’t need,” she says, looking somewhat defeated.

“I guess you could not have power out there. You really don’t want electricity anymore? Na meh oo may ta oh bah na tha ku nay meh oo ohahh—Are you happier without electricity than with it?”

They seem perplexed by this question, which was perhaps expressed with strange syntax. Hei Nay Htoo is looking very serious and says, “I don’t know.”

“Do you still want a car?”

“Ya da tha law gah luh bah. Ya ga pghay ga boh yoo—I don’t want a car anymore, I will buy a plane!”

“Na ga leh peh leh—Where will you go?”

“Ya ga gay luh ya gaw—I will go back to my country.”

“Ya gay tha goh na thayahh—Can I go with you?”

“Uhh. Na ga noh gab oh yoo—Yes, you will drive the plane!”

“Pa ga thee—We will die!”

A couple days later I see Pa Saw Paw, a good friend of myself and Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw.

“Wonderful Pa told me he hasn’t slept in two days because you told him they can’t have electricity anymore after November 17^th.”

I break into laughter, unable to believe what I am hearing.

“I told them if they don’t pay the bill again before then, it will be cut off. I thought they didn’t want electricity in Comer?!”

“Haha. I told them that it is no problem; they can still have power. But Wonderful Pa was very worried.”

Refuge

A young man holds up a colorful zippered case. “Maybe they thought there was money inside,” he says, opening it to reveal the crisp white pages of a Karen Bible. His sister was carrying this, walking home from a worship music practice at a neighboring apartment with another young Karen woman, when three men attacked them. Thorns snagged their flesh as they fled from their aggressors into the woods. They went to the hospital later that day for their injuries.

“Thara, aw may—Teacher, eat rice,” the brother tells me.

“Ya aw may wee lee—I’ve already eaten.”

The mother, father, and younger brother sit at the table eating rice with some kind of fried meat and bamboo shoots. I recognize the younger brother from the guitar class I sometimes assist with at the Community Center.

“You went to the guitar class on Friday, right?”

“Yes. I saw you there,” he says smiling.

“Do you go every week?”

“Yes. Every week.”

I gradually realize that I know the older brother as well. He taught me a Karen praise song just last week while I was visiting another friend’s apartment, but at the time I had thought he was a relative of that family. He talks quickly and calmly in Karen with Tha Htaw, my friend who brought me to their house, I listen attentively as though I can understand. Waiting for a pause in their conversation, I interject,

“I am sorry about what happened to your sister. Let me know if you need anything. Especially a ride to the hospital.”

“Yes, yes. Ok. Thank you.”

I follow Tha Htaw out of the apartment and thank him for leading me there. We walk together towards his apartment several buildings over and I say goodbye to him at the base of the stairs before commencing the ten-minute walk back to the apartment complex where I live. The sun is lazing behind the trees creating a soft white glow in the sky. The temperature is dropping and the cool evening air nips at my exposed arms. I pass by the unoccupied wood and red plastic playground adjacent to Tha Htaw’s apartment, and stroll down the hill towards the gate.

By the mail pavilion at the bottom of the hill there is a large gathering of children. In the center of the circle, a Karen boy stands across from an African-American boy roughly the same age. They are no older than ten or eleven. A slightly taller African-American girl stands between them, asking the Karen boy in slow and simplified speech, “Do you want to fight him?” I slow my pace and watch them conspicuously from the sidewalk, stopping at the corner feeling a sudden sense of responsibility to prevent this from escalating. I fiddle with my phone there for a couple minutes and then decide to take another lap around the building in order to pass the gathering again. As I approach a second time, a bold woman arriving home at her apartment shouts to them, “Go home all of you! You are too smart for all of this! You think you’re too young to go to juvie?”

The children slowly disperse. “Go on! You’re too smart for all of this!” She looks my way for a moment and shakes her head. I watch the Karen boys walk away towards the gate of the complex and the African-Americans in the opposite direction. I walk slowly behind the Karen along the drive leading to the exit. I feel this burning in my heart to dissolve distinctions, yet feel utterly apart from all of this as a silent observer, an outsider.

The white experience is characterized by a particular uncertainty. It is a search for ethnicity. In a town like Clarkston, for me it is an experience of otherness. In the past two generations, my family gradually migrated further and further outside of Baltimore city. As distinctive European ethnicities dissolved into a racial label, white became a unifying color, the absence of color. Thus my people fled the ethnic infusion of the city to seek refuge in a more homogeneous environment.

This is a natural tendency, which becomes perverted when we think in terms of race. The word, “discriminate,” literally means, “to make distinctions.” Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens states, “It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” Our brains automatically create distinctions between people because of superficial differences. It is part of our instinct for self-preservation. We are meant to know and love our own distinctive ethnicity, and in so doing recognize that this is a universal human experience.

I recognize in myself the need to recover this healthy psychology, to know myself as an ethnic person, a German Catholic American. It is only from this distinctive place that I am able to enter into the human arena, to carry on a corporate desire for preservation. I enter with a desire to do something positive in this place of interethnic tension and to engage in the recovery of my own ethnicity as I am immersed in Karen culture. I seek the knowledge that I am not blind.

A boy on a bicycle calls out behind me, “Here they are!” Several other children on bicycles follow them. I turn to him with a stern face and say, “Leave them alone.” I hear the woman call out from the distance, “HEY! GO HOME!” The children gradually turn back down the drive, and gravity carries them down the hill and they glide away into dispersion among the trees and brick buildings.

My cell phone goes off in my pocket and I look at the screen to see the name of the brother of the girl who was beaten. I am surprised he is calling me already, but assume they need a ride to the hospital or something. I flip open the phone and say, “Hello?”

“Hello. You left your bag at my house. If you have free time, you can come and visit. Next week we will have thanksgiving, worship God at my house, if you can come.”