Respond
Accordingly
“Between
stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose
our response. In our response lies our growth, our freedom.”
Viktor
Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
Driving
home from the Dismals Canyon on Monday, we stopped for gas in the “free state
of Winston.” (Back in the day, after the “war of Northern aggression,” Winston
county wanted to secede from the United States. It did not want to accept losing
the Civil War nor all the changes that came with that loss.) We stopped at a
gas station in a small town, and I jumped out to go inside and use the
facilities. As I walked toward the door, I noticed painted across the top of
it, “American Owned,” and as I got closer, “Pull up your pants, or don’t come
in the store.” A sign also said, “Weapons are welcome as long as the safety is
on, and they are holstered. Don’t discharge your weapon inside the store unless
necessary, and then, please choose your target judiciously.”
Clearly,
Winston County is still miffed about losing that war—moving on is so
challenging. I was offended by the clearly written warnings and found myself grousing
and grumbling all the way back to the car. I don’t understand what causes this hateful
mentality, except that we lose touch with, or never learn about, the actual
freedom we have to enter the space that Frankl wrote about so long ago—the one
in which we can choose our response. That goes for me as well as for the owners
of the gas station. We can choose compassion for humanity, or we can choose to
reject anyone who doesn’t look like us. The choice is ours.
I
realize, too, that we are granted freedom of expression under the first
amendment. The fact that the owners of that gas station and I have different
understandings of what is important is protected by the United States
constitution. They self-express their beliefs and so do I. But it demonstrates
the gulf we find ourselves divided by across this country—not just in Alabama.
I wonder if the space exists in which we can come together, or if we will
always stare at one another with disgust across the great divide.
A friend of mine, who was
born in Hartsell just up the interstate from this small town, shed some light
on what causes people to hold onto old ways of thinking. He said he was able to
leave for college, where he met people who influenced his thinking, and then he
moved out to the west coast for a while, where people simply didn’t have the
history of the Civil War, and they helped open his mind to new ways of seeing
life. If he had stayed in his hometown and gone to work for his father as the
family planned, that change might never have happened. I think this is more the
case than not. We don’t make open-minded choices because we don’t know what our
choices could be. In that small town, an open mind would create a new kind of
distance. It would separate the owners of that gas station from their
community, and probably from their family.
Change requires courage,
and it will bring loss with it. We know about being kicked out of the tribe; being
“voted off the island” so to speak. We don’t like it, so sometimes we settle
for things we don’t hold dear just to preserve our place in the community. We bite
our tongues and close our hearts to protect ourselves from being rejected. I
don’t know if that’s what happened to the gas station owners, but here’s the true
problem with it: “In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” It
is up to us—we can stay stuck in the past, or we can open the door and breath
in fresh air.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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