Dear all:

I can certainly empathize with living in a bad neighborhood.  I lived in the Central District of Seattle when it was a bad neighborhood and prostitutes hung out on the corner and men (not women) harassed me when I walked home from school.  In what was then Zaire, I was often harassed by men and had a friend who was raped in another area of the country.  I've lived in many and even lived in countries where entire areas might be considered bad neighborhoods.  Every time I visited Cambodia I would decide not to visit Angkor Wat because there was a bridge blown up or some other incident.  In the Philippines, I had to talk a driver out of killing his boss on a three-hour ride where he was waving a gun around.  I could fill pages of "incidents", but in the 33 countries I visited or lived in, I always found people with whom I found community and similarities.

I can also empathize with having fears about your child or children.  The most painful incident for me was when my son was completely ostracized by all the mothers at his Jewish nursery school within the first month of starting school.  They would call to their children to get away from my son.  It turns out that one mother had spread the rumor that my son had bitten a girl.  The nursery school director was so appalled by their behavior that she had a mandatory meeting for all the parents where she explained that biting is normal behavior and unavoidable in nursery school, that there was no evidence that nursery school at age 2-1/2 benefited children, what they did about preventing biting and what they did when it happened and that my son was NOT the biter.  She also implemented a once a week talk with a child development specialist.  I considered it group therapy and forced myself to go.  It took me a long time of going to that group (with many times of having to force myself not to fall asleep and drool on the coffee table when the mothers would talk about Prada bags) to finally feel a sense of community with those mothers.  In the end, I actually credit those mothers with teaching me that threaded through the light gossip of mother to mother conversations are very important underlying themes that build a community of assistance to develop pragmatic solutions for rearing your children.  I eventually even came to understand that the mother who started the rumor was extremely insecure about her own parenting and thus, acted out by making comments about the rest of us.

My son had his head smashed repeatedly against a brick wall in third grade to the point of a light concussion. Despite the fact that that child is from a particular “group”, my son’s best friend is also from that “group”.  So, my son has not attributed the behavior of the child who beat his head against the wall to a “group” behavior.  At the age of 8, he already realized that this child has circumstances at home that are going to make his life a challenge. My son also takes martial arts and has a black belt now, so in fifth grade my son is now unafraid, but still avoids this child so as not to provoke him. Last week this child again tried aggressive behavior by slugging my son and then stole my son’s lunch box, my son knew that if didn’t react the child would get bored with the lunch box. 

I am grateful that something my imperfect parents did in my rearing enabled me to look beyond the group and discovered the underlying reasons why people sometimes behave in unacceptable ways.  I’ve never for a moment when I actually considered it important whether someone on Lactnet is “liberal”, “conservative”, “libertarian”, “democrat”, “republican”, “working family party (which is a category on New York State ballots)”, “socialist” or “communist”.  I find that all too often these labels are used inappropriately to label someone when they may disagree with the person who is doing the labeling.

It is perfectly fine to label the threatening behavior of the prostitutes on that street corner is unacceptable.  At the same time it is unacceptable to label all prostitutes as immoral when in fact those prostitutes may have lived through horrors of sexual abuse that you may not have endured.  Similarly, while I can understand how unacceptable it may feel to be labeled and pressured to undertake a test that you don’t want, it doesn’t mean that labeling entire groups is acceptable.  Ditto for politics.  In the United States, how we vote is a private affair and I never assume from a person’s behavior to know how they vote.  

I hope that all those who live in threatening circumstances can eventually live in sufficiently secure circumstances and heal the wounds that can develop into fear and hatred of the “other”.  

Sincerely,

Susan E. Burger

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