Still dressed up: Greeting unknown humans with stubborn positivity

I was waiting my turn at the check-in desk at the chiropractor’s office on Samhain (that’s the day after Halloween for non-Pagans). I can’t see much with my funky eyes, so I don’t know precisely how it happened—whether the receptionist glanced at me or what—but the person ahead of me turned around, looked me up and down in an exaggerated way that even I could see, did a dramatic physical double-take and declared in a negative tone, “Watch out! She’s still dressed up!”

I was a bit taken aback and befuddled, so all I managed was to mumble, “I’m not actually dressed up.” The lady turned back around and ignored me, finished her business and left.

Image via Pixabay - Image of a woman’s face covered with colorful paint

When I shared this experience, a lot of my friends expressed shock and outrage or said I should have made a witty comeback. I wish I was that quick on my feet and I could think of several afterwards, ranging from, “Well, at least my costume doesn’t impede my ability to be polite!” to “I’m so glad you noticed!” with a little faux preening. But unfortunately, past social trauma makes me go into deer-in-the-headlights freeze mode when things like this happen out of the blue.

So, my witty comebacks are usually all for naught. And the truth is I wasn’t that upset about the comment itself. Afterwards, I could certainly see the argument of several friends that it is never okay to randomly comment on a stranger’s appearance. That really is social skills 101.

But I can’t help pondering more deeply. I was clean and had street clothes on. I was wearing a head scarf of no particular cultural background. I wear them as a personal reminder of oaths to my gods, so it is a bit of a religious head covering, but frankly, I also wear it because I have bald spots that often show, despite having long hair.

I was also wearing a colorful tunic and a long black sweater over it that could have been mistaken for a very vague imitation of something out of Harry Potter. And of course, I was carrying a white cane.

So, more than a witty response, I wish I’d asked, “What part makes you think it’s a costume? Really. Just curious.”

Was it the colorful headscarf and shirt which only sort of matched because they used the same color combination but in different patterns? Was it the black leggings and sweater? Or was it the white cane?

I did see a meme about a pilot dressing up as a blind person, using a white cane as he boarded the plane and entered the cockpit in front of passengers. I’ve got to say that I hope that wasn’t why she thought I was in costume, because that’s not okay. If dressing up as Pocahontas isn’t okay, then dressing up as a blind person isn’t either. The same type of disrespect is involved.

If it was either of the other two or a combination… Well, I guess that would imply a bit of small-town thinking on the part of my fellow sufferer of back pain. But I expect my getup would not have generated much comment in a larger city, even if manners didn’t censor most people’s impulses. I have certainly dressed in more flamboyant things and rarely get a comment.

Maybe that’s just because my outfits are considered so outlandish that it’s awkward to mention it. And really, since I’m not applying for a job, that’s okay. I try to tone it down a little when I go to advocate for my child’s special education needs, but otherwise those who dislike my free-spirited, definitely-not-up-to-date fashion sense too intensely are welcome to weed themselves out of my overly chaotic life.

The truth is I’m just tired of trying to please people all the time, especially when it appears to have no effect on anything. I know that I have some disadvantages in social stuff by being visually impaired. I can’t make eye contact. I can’t recognize people. I can’t smile and wave at acquaintances.

That all creates a lot of awkwardness, some hard feelings and misunderstandings at times and so forth. But I make sure to tell people this. And I smile a lot. I devote a lot of time and attention to making sure sighted people will feel comfortable with my expression and hedging my bets on whether or not I know them, as well as when and how to ask them to let me know who they are in a sensitive way.

An unflattering selfie of me to show what I was really wearing at the chiropractor’s office

But mostly I just try to be friendly and positive. With all the bureaucratic, medical and special education stuff my kids and I have been dealing with I have to see and interact with a wide variety of people every day, many of them strangers and many of them acquaintances who have seen me a few times. I smile and do small talk when appropriate. I I give complements whenever I can find a way that isn’t awkward. I may be frustrated with their whole bureaucracy, but I still smile and compliment the person in front of me.

And yet, the responses I get from people are so often negative. There are a few exceptions, but they aren’t friends. They’re just people who are polite and friendly back at me. And they are definitely a small minority, one in ten or so.

Some days I do worry that this is all because of me. Is the negativity of my circumstances so intense, that no matter how much positivity I put out, it hangs on me like a stench? Are my clothing or grooming choices truly just beyond the pale? Are my eyes and lack of eye contact so disconcerting that most people can’t get past it, despite gentle reminders that I’m not doing it on purpose?

All that wondering leads to a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. But I remind myself daily that it also leads to naval gazing and self-focus. The truth is that people are mostly wrapped up in their own troubles and likely not paying that much attention to me (or anyone else).

But that leads me to the final option for why I run into so much negativity on a daily basis. If it isn’t me but I’m still encountering negativity constantly, then it’s just out there and everyone is suffering from it. That may be a psychologically healthier way to look at it, but it’s also way more disturbing.

With the crises of climate change, war and so much trouble in the world, I could wish the negativity was due to something simple like my fashion choices. If it is true that the world is just full of so much resentment and isolation that everyone is experiencing what I’m experiencing from others, we’re in bigger trouble than I ever imagined as a young activist for positive changes in the world.

How do we stand a chance at ending wars or reversing environmental destruction, if friends rarely meet in person, people don’t form new friendships beyond school, people look at strangers with judgement and resentment first and a circle of trusted friends or family is a rare luxury that few experience?

I fear that this is the real reason for the social isolation I experience and for much of the big troubles of our world. As much as I was frustrated with older people who said things like this when I was a young activist, because I wanted big changes first. I see now that we will never manage any lasting or worthwhile big changes until people make changes in their spirit and how the relate in community.

I can tell you from the experience of someone who could never see other people’s faces so the world is eternally full of probable strangers, that it is hard to keep smiling kindly, keep greeting people with generosity, keep open the belief that the next vague unknown form you meet may be a dear friend. It’s hard but necessary. When sighted people—when enough of everyone—starts greeting the world the way well-adjusted blind people greet the world, maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a chance of solving some big problems.

The long road to "That isn't on me."

A young girl wrote wrenching words to a group I’m in. So young. A pretty, thin teen with charcoal hair, umber skin and eyes that clearly move non-traditionally. .

She said she was struggling with the concept that she would never be able to do so many things she wanted to because she was born blind: ”I wanted to drive a car, sneak out with friends, go to parties, have a sleep over… And I wanted to see and flirt with cute guys. That was the life i was excited for. Now I’m realizing it wasn’t meant for me.”

A lot of people wrote back, telling her to believe in herself, not to set limits on her dreams. “Blindness doesn’t have to define you…” But others admonished her for appearing to ask for sympathy, even though this was a support group for blind people, not exactly mixed company. “Don’t fish for pity…” Yadda yadda yadda….

But I read her words over again and sat lost in thought. This girl wasn’t limiting her dreams. I don’t hear her saying she can’t be a scientist or a professional athlete or president. I hear her saying some very real things. Yup, driving a car is out for us. We learn that early on.

But then there are the other things—the social life, the little crowd of friends, the parties, the giggling under the covers when a friend spends the night, the staying out ‘til the streetlights come on or sneaking out afterwards.

Image via Pixabay - Two girls with arms around each other’s shoulders pumping their fists with a bleak gray background.

That isn’t a girl limiting her dreams. She has a couple of friends, kids of her parent’s friends, who have known her since before her difference was “weird.” But they also have their crowd and the cost of inviting along one’s geeky blind childhood friend with the creepy eyes is steep. There may be someone out there who would do it, but most blind kids aren’t lucky enough to have a badass, social daredevil for a friend.

This girl isn’t limiting her dreams or fishing for pity. She’s just expressing sorrow over coming to grips things that are denied to her. She’s young and she has probably been told she can do “anything, even if you’re blind” by people who mean well and who also don’t want to feel uncomfortable emotions. And she’s starting to find out that it’s not entirely true.

If she is making a mistake, it is only in lumping the social things together with driving a car, as if they too were a natural consequence of blindness. They aren’t. But I didn’t know that when I was that age either.

I remember being fourteen and noticing the blurry sunlight in my bedroom window turn orange, signaling the end to another solitary Saturday in June, listening to the happy yells of teenagers in the alley through that open window. That day—for the first time—I knew where the party was. Someone had let it slip within my hearing at school. I didn’t know who lived there, but it was just a couple of blocks over.

I put on my jean jacket, which had once been fashionable back when I went through a phase of studying fashion and trying really hard to be “with it.” I put my hair in a scrunchy and walked the two blocks to the place where the party was happening. I put a smile on, carefully rechecking it internally—not too big or obvious but enough to be friendly. The door was open with music blaring out, so I walked up the steps past a couple of guys sitting out front.

No one acknowledged me. I couldn’t see their faces. But my little bit of residual sight and their breathing and low conversation told me they were all guys. They might not even really know me, but I could tell they were my age, not grownups. I slipped into the doorway, which was festooned with streamers. The bold, cheerfully brash tones of the 1980s screeched from speakers and the sound inside was so loud that most of my skill at echolocation was wiped out.

There were girls dancing just inside. I could tell by their dim silhouettes and their giggles. There was a burst of laugher and someone slammed into me, pushing me against the wall and sloshing a drink across my chest. The girls erupted into gales of laughter. Then they were gone, scurrying away into the crowd of amorphous shapes.

I looked down and sniffed. Sprite. Well, at least it was clear and only a bit of my shirt was wet. I was used to rough and tumble with two brothers, so I wasn’t immediately sure that I wasn’t welcome. I stood against the wall for a long time, observing as best I could and trying to look friendly and “with it.”

I could hear the occasional voice I recognized from school. I didn’t know the names to go with those voices. The other kids were only ever introduced at the beginning of the year and then they only said their name out loud once in home room. That wasn’t enough to capture the voices and put names to the kids nearest me in school. But after a few months I did know when kids from my class were close by from their familiar voices.

Even so, no one spoke to me. A few dancers stepped on my toes or pushed me aside a bit with gradually increasing force. But no one directed so much as, “oops!” to me.

Finally, someone whose face I couldn’t see came up and took my shoulders, steering me toward the door. And I went. I made sure I was steady enough to keep them from pushing me down the steps, but I didn’t resist. I walked home along the sidewalk, my head up, pretending I didn’t care.

It wasn’t the first time I experienced that kind of cold shoulder and rejection, and it wasn’t the last by a long shot. But it was the last time I tried just going to a party put on by my classmates that I had heard about. And it was the only private party for teens I went to during high school.

Nope. No one ever invited me. There were a couple of kids I was friends with at the three different schools I attended during my teens, but they weren’t either the partying type or in a position to throw a party.

Is not getting invited to parties the worst thing in the world? Of course not. I lived in a sheltered, nice small town. I didn’t have to worry about hunger, violence or familial abuse. A lot of teens have terrible problems that I didn’t have. But when I crept out my window on Halloween to roam the streets, I did it alone, a real ghost walking in the dusk with kids speeding by, shouting and laughing in their own pursuits.

I wanted so badly to be part of a happy and inclusive crowd, to feel friends’ arms around my shoulders from either side, to share my excitement with someone, to laugh at their jokes and to know that if I fell behind they’d reach out pull me along because I was one of the pack.

All these years later, I know what the pretty teenage girl is talking about. I listened to well-meaning adults back then. I went to a self-esteem building program called “Wings” and I chanted affirmations before going to bed every night. All those messages from adults warned me that the worst thing a person with a disability can do is to complain or elicit sympathy from others.

Now, with the experience of an extra thirty years, those people telling this girl not to “put limits on her dreams” or “fish for pity” make me want to gnash my teeth.

Instead, I wrote to her: “I hope you know that you can do all those things as well as anyone, with the sole exception of driving a car. The problems you have doing these things are what we call a ‘social construct.’ It isn't ‘meant to be.’ It isn’t God or biology or your body that has taken those things from you. I snuck out of a windows as a teenager. I was quite good at it in fact. But no friends ever did it with me because I had eyes like yours. These things were ‘off-limits’ only because of social constraints.”

“As for putting limits on one’s dreams, I have been a war correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, a major international publication. I have published ten books and travelled in 35+ countries. I am raising two kids. I have built rock walls with my own hands. I have fed my family by farming the land. Believe me. I am not a blind person who puts limits on myself or spends time in self pity or in fishing for other people’s sympathy.”

“But society does put limits on me. For years, I beat myself up mentally because I wanted what you want and I thought it was me that was the problem. I thought I should learn to accept it. That’s what my mentors told me. And they didn’t blame me exactly but they implied that the exclusion was my fault, or at least a consequence of being visually impaired. I thought I just needed to try harder.”

“Now I’m almost forty-five and I want to tell you that that is bullshit. Certainly, avoid putting limits on your dreams. But your words don’t sound like that to me. I was a nice, friendly girl with a ton of interests and a good sense of humor. But I didn’t get to go to parties and I had precious few sleepovers, almost entirely with the kids of my parent’s friends. I didn't limit myself. Society and prejudiced people did. I was outgoing and friendly. I got kicked down, told ‘Oh, it's just for us and a few close friends!’ or ‘Maybe sometime!’ or just given a cold shoulder so many times there is no counting. That's society. That's prejudice, even bigotry. Call it what it is. Don’t blame yourself and I hope the people telling you to try harder and implying you are fishing for sympathy are reading this too, because putting this on you is abusive.”

“I wish I could give you a hug. I hope you will find your own dreams and follow them. But I’ve also got to tell you that this crap that is social exclusion has nothing to do with you. It’s all on them. I’m sorry to say that it isn’t likely to change soon, but you will find the occasional person who is open-minded and a real friend. Value them and give them your best side. Try not to let the negativity of bigots make you bitter, so that you can still turn around and be a good friend to those who are ready. But don't blame yourself because it just isn't about the blindness. It's about the same old sickness of our society that brings racism, sexism and all the rest of it.”

That may seem harsh, calling kids “bigots” because they don’t invite the blind girl in their class to a casual party. But that is actually putting it mildly and with a large dose of emotional distance.

I did meet a new friend that same year—when I was fourteen—who was ready to be friends with the blind girl next door. At least a little. Like a lot of friends, she didn’t act like she knew me in public. That was okay with me. Or at least it was worth the price. She was a good friend and we shared real interests, like the medieval history club.

Life happened and even though my life took me away from that small town and around the world over the next couple of decades, circumstances brought that friend a lot closer and into the circle of my family. There have been a lot of times when social things were tough, and I’d think of the handful of people I could really count on—my friend from that old neighborhood among them, even though thousands of miles lay between us. We’ve supported each other through some very tough times.

This past year, divisions split many friends in the US and while we agree on almost everything, there were some things we didn’t see eye to eye on. There came a moment when my friend was so angry that she lashed out at me in text.

As happens with a lot of arguments, my friend made it personal. But instead of just calling me argumentative or selfish or closed-minded or insulting my sources—all things that could at least be rationally argued—she went for my disability and my writing about my experiences, accusing me of making up the social difficulties related to my disability in order to “manipulate people and get sympathy.” To be clear, the argument wasn’t even vaguely related to disability or social exclusion.

I know my blogs have increasingly become about disability issues and maybe it bothers more than just this friend. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my blogs, whatever your reasons. And I can see that it might seem like I obsess about this stuff, if you go on what I write here.

But the truth is that I rarely talk about these things in offline life. Last night, I mentioned something about my vision to a local friend because I had just spent the day seeing a major eye specialist in the city, and I was surprised at her shock. Then, I realized that I never talk about this stuff in person, even something innocuous like saying that I went to the eye doctor.

I spend most days thinking about kids, chickens, gardening, teaching students, preparing lessons, cleaning, cooking, doing the dishes, making crafts and now homeschooling. I don’t have a lot of time for disability issues, even being socially isolated enough that Covid lockdown barely changed my life at all.

Maybe that’s partly why I write about it, because it is an otherwise neglected part of my life. But I know it is also because these are issues I don’t hear anyone else talking or writing about. Or at least very little. And yes, while I don’t focus on the social impacts of disability every day, they underlie my whole life. They are defining factors that I have to take into account, like gravity or Covid. But unlike universal restrictions, that social exclusion is something I observe only affecting me and other people with disabilities.

So, I write because it is needed and silence hurts.

I don’t write this stuff to garner sympathy, and that’s fortunate because I haven’t received much sympathy since I started writing here. Instead, I have developed some great connections with people who experience similar things or who want to understand reality better. But even that isn’t really the point. The point is that I am a journalist. I write the things that need to be told and things that the world needs to hear. That’s just what I do.

If you’re a reader who came to my blogs for the general social justice stuff or to see what it’s like to live in the Czech Republic or to get books or to learn about herbs or earthy spirituality and you find my posts about social exclusion, disability and societal prejudices to be uncomfortable and out of touch with the reality you know, I hope you’ll bide a moment with your discomfort. It is okay to feel uncomfortable.

When someone tells about social injustice that they experience, the rest of us often feel an obligation to do something. And that is why it can seem like they are complaining or trying to manipulate others. But the fact is that there is no specific action I am asking for. It is really the understanding and the awareness that will help. If anything, share a post that opens you up to a new and uncomfortable reality.

But mostly just be open to the perspective. That openness alone will create the change we all need in this troubled world.

It is a stereotype like any other negative stereotype, that people with disabilities—or at least some of them—are “fakers” and “complainers.” Partly that stereotype comes from the (often-subconscious) fear abled people have of the inevitable disabilities of old age.

Partly it comes from the kind of jealousy my children have of adults. “You don’t have to do chores and homework!” They can’t see how much adults do have to do. Abled people see disabled people getting a few little curb cuts in life, and many think we have it easy and enjoy a little mooching… or that SOME of us must be faking or exaggerating just to get the bennies or at least to garner a little sympathy.

Just like I explain these things to my kids, you have really got no idea. The only breaks disabled people actually get are things that society has figured out will make us cost society a lot less because they allow us to deal with our own lives by ourselves better. That’s it.

Frankly, the only time I ever got “sympathy” for being blind was one time when I was a kid and some lady at a bus station prayed over me and it was a distinctly strange and uncomfortable experience. Most people with disabilities avoid “sympathy” like the plague for precisely that reason. It might feel moderately good from the giving end, but it is usually really weird and unrewarding on the receiving end. And that’s real sympathy, not even the toxicity of pity.

More than anything, if there is one thing I do want to try to manipulate people into it is to refrain from making abusive and prejudiced remarks that hurt people with disabilities. It doesn’t really matter if you once somewhere heard about a person faking a disability to get something or an actually disabled person trying to manipulate people’s sympathy, please don’t use that stereotype as an accusation or an automatic way to discredit a person with a disability in a disagreement.

That accusation is exactly like using racial epithets or calling a woman the slang equivalent of “sex worker.” If you go there in an argument, it isn’t about the argument or the person you’re arguing with. That’s on the person using the bigoted remark. It is a sickness that is within those fostering prejudice.

That isn’t on me. It isn’t on us.

Tolerating those with beliefs you (strongly) disagree with

I live among many people with beliefs I dislike—often abhor.

I live in a small town in Central Bohemia in the Czech Republic. It is almost entirely white and affluent. Recently a few Asian families have moved to town to open businesses. There are also a handful of oddball people of color—one kid at school with a mother from the Caribbean and so forth.

The opinions of most of my neighbors reflect that. They are inexperienced, fearful of people with different skin tones, and resentful of the hardworking Asian business owners (who keep their shops open hours after everyone else has closed up). They blithely “pop out to the Vietnamese” at 8:00 pm to get a snack when no one else in ten kilometers is open, but they’ll be back at the Asian-bashing the next morning… or often as not, on the way home from the store..

Beyond that, the country is not very diverse. We are among the handful of countries in the EU who have taken in the fewest refugees as a percent of population. My neighbors are always telling me about why we shouldn’t take in refugees, particularly not from Muslim countries.

This isn’t backwoods ignorance but rather pseudo-intellectual rhetoric:

“European culture is founded on Christianity and the enlightenment. Even though most of us are not really Christians anymore, that’s our cultural foundation. Muslims don’t fit in here and they will make enclaves where they enforce their culture and beliefs. They’ll also change our overall culture. They have a lot more children than we do. In the end, you know they want to force us to live under Sharia law.”

There are so many false assumptions in this common public story that I hear from every side daily, even within my own family. that it would take at least five blog posts to cover them all:

1. No, Europe was actually Pagan. Christianity came from the same general area as a large number of the refugees.

2. Refugees don’t erase your cultural foundation. Throughout history, nations that accepted refugees have done better economically and become more culturally enlightened. I’ve never seen a historical exception to this fact.

3. Poor and desperate people have more children. Secure people with access to education and health care have fewer children. That’s a very basic biological fact about humans as a species. If you want to curb population growth, give people education and health care.

4. The majority of Muslim immigrants don’t want Sharia law. Fanaticism is often a top reason they left their homelands. Even in Muslim majority countries, opinions about Islamic extremists are overwhelmingly negative.

Creative Commons image by Andy Blackledge

The fact remains that I live next to, converse politely with and even maintain a shallow level of friendship with many people who hold a lot of bigoted, inexperienced and hateful opinions. I have little choice, since I live in a country where these are the views of the vast majority of the population. Unless I want to be a hermit, who only shops at the family owned Vietnamese store (with nice people) and who doesn’t even use social media, I have to learn to live in the vicinity of horrid opinions.

But the original question that sparked this post on befriending or respecting those with beliefs you don’t like came from these same people—just the other way around. I have been asked many times how I can have Muslim friends and express respect for Muslims, when I am not a Muslim and I clearly disagree with some common Muslim beliefs and even the very basis of that religion.

Once I had a party with a lot of international friends from the city. There were probably thirty people in my yard and living room. One of my foreigner friends from the high-energy activist culture of Prague, a Palestinian student, had brought a couple of his friends.who I didn’t know as well. At one point they approached me as a group and asked if there was some quiet place where they could pray, given that they really did pray five times a day.

The choices weren’t spectacular. The yard was full and mostly dirt at the time anyway. The house was tiny with the main room, one bedroom with too little floor space and my office area, which also included a couple of beds behind a curtain. I took them to the office, which at least had a door that could be closed.

The office not only had rumpled beds and a pile of my folded clothing but various Pagan statues and artwork scattered around. I noticed that the Muslim students seemed a bit uneasy about the arrangement, but it really was the only viable option. They quickly rallied and expressed their appreciation. I pointed out the direction of southeast, which was easy since my practice involves compass points as well. Then I left them to it.

Before that, I once accompanied a Muslim woman in Kazakhstan on a pilgrimage to a holy site in Turkestan (which is a town, not a country). My interest was journalism and personal experience. This woman narrated much of her beliefs and practice along the way, while I went through the motions as a sign of respect and as a way to broaden my own understanding.

All this, and I can still say I really don’t agree with Islam.

I know some Muslims like to point out that the word “Islam” is closely connected to the word “peace,” but let’s face it, the history of Islam has been far from peaceful. Show me a major religion without copious amounts of blood on its hands.

The Koran says some violent and intolerant things, whether about the particular battles of Mohammed’s time or about the way the world works in general. And so does the Bible and so do lots of original Pagan myths. I’m not arguing that we have to take these things literally or that I’m better than anyone else. But the fact is that there are plenty of things in the Koran that I don’t like.

There is that controversy over the “Verse of the Swords,” which can be read to mean that a Muslim should fight, hound and persecute non-believers wherever they be found or it can e read to be referring only to a specific incident when some Pagans broke a treaty with Mohammed. Mohammed sounds to me like a pretty normal leader, trying to deal with the realities of the world and getting confused about how much force should be used in defense of what he believes—hardly someone copying down directly the words dictated by the one and only true God.

Another controversy arises out of verse 4:34 of the Koran regarding relations between husbands and wives. It states that women should be obedient because God put men over women and if a wife disobeys, her husband should first advise her, then refuse to have sex and finally“strike” her if she doesn’t submit. Scholars like to argue over the many possible meanings of the word “strike” in Arabic, some insisting that the verse does not actually condone domestic violence.

But that isn’t even my primary concern. I’m still stuck on the part about women being obedient and God putting men over women. I know this was written for a violent and harsh time and women did often need the protection of men. But men needed the life-giving power of women. And this is supposed to be directly inspired by God. And hopefully God—even a regular god, let alone the one and only God—surely ought to be able to see beyond the local, current context when dictating the ultimate rules for everything.

So, it isn’t a religion for me. I can’t go with both believing the Koran is literally inspired by the only true God and that we have to take the stuff about women being inferior in social context. I really don’t like these beliefs. But it is the peaceful way of life and the respect toward women shown by the Muslims I meet that makes them welcome for me.

A few years ago, I decided to read the mythology of every major religion to my children for a year. I obtained children’s versions of the important stories from Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and a wide variety of Pagan and indigenous faiths.

Some of the Jewish and Christian stories made me pause. I skipped a few of the more gruesome ones that I just couldn’t conscience reading to young children. But when I got to the Islamic stories, I couldn’t find ANY that were not deeply problematic from the perspective of modern, sheltered children. Maybe I had the wrong book, though it had an author who professed to be Muslim and it was specifically for children.

I’ll grant that Pagan stories have been sanitized over the years. We don’t have such old texts, so we will likely never know how gruesome the versions of our stories from 1,500 years ago would have been, if we could read them in the original. And again, I don’t encourage literalism in mythology.

But there is also the matter of the whole Islamic thing about how there is only one God and some intolerance toward those who believe otherwise. I do have many gods and I dislike intolerance in Islam as much as I dislike similar intolerance in my neighbors.

But here is the thing. I tolerate in society those who do not impose their beliefs on others.

Islamic extremists do impose their beliefs on others. I will always speak out against such extremists and I won’t tolerate them or welcome them to a community. The same goes for Christian fundamentalists who seek to impose their beliefs on others. The same goes for those who may call themselves Pagan or Heathen, while usurping my spiritual symbols for the purposes of intolerance and hate.

Those Muslims I do tolerate are those who have been, in my substantial experience, considerate and accepting of others. I do not claim to understand why they believe in a faith I don’t always like.

All I ask in return is that they don’t instantly judge me for the actions of white supremacists who steal Pagan symbols and defame my spiritual path.

Those people I befriend are those who are willing to have open conversations, those who come into my home and treat me, my family and my beliefs with respect and care. Again, I don’t have to like or agree with all of the beliefs of my friends, although to be friends I do hope to have conversations about such things and at least seek to understand each other’s perspective.

Europeans who fear Muslims often ask me, “How can you trust them? I read that Muslims are taught to lie to non-believers and behave nicely so that they can get into a position to either kill us or force us to convert.”

I have read the same allegations. And I know for a fact that some Christian groups teach this very thing in the US: “Work your way into their confidence. Use gifts and friendship to get close to them and then bring them to Jesus.” I haven’t personally encountered an emphasis on killing unbelievers among American Christians, but my pacifist brother was once beaten by kids in a youth group while Christian adult leaders looked on and encouraged them to “beat the devil out of him.”

So, yeah, I believe Muslim extremists probably teach something like this too. I don’t have real personal experience or evidence of it. But it stands to reason, given the similarities to other religious extremists and their preferred interpretation of the “Verse of the Sword.”

Do I believe that my Muslim friends are secretly plotting to someday stop being nice, force us to convert and kill us if we refuse? No, I just don’t believe that.

Why don’t I? I have several other friends who were raised Muslim but aren’t practicing Muslims, who are critical of the religion or just turned atheist. And I have no doubt that if Muslims across the board were taught that doctrine, many such people would have talked about it openly by now. It just is not a mainstream Muslim thing,

So, I don’t actually find it at all difficult to tolerate or befriend Muslims who probably hold beliefs that I dislike. They don’t bludgeon me with their beliefs. They are tolerant and respectful of others. Do I understand? No, not really. But I’m willing to have deep philosophical conversations with them and maybe someday I will understand.

I find it harder to tolerate and befriend racist and isolationist neighbors. I mostly do it because I have little choice. I have friendships where I have to avoid a lot of topics of conversation. Those friendships are shallow, utilitarian and mostly for the children involved.

And even so, I entirely avoid those who really go overboard with expressing racist and isolationist opinions. I don’t want that around my kids. I don’t really even want it in my own ears.

Do I fully understand them? No. I am willing to have deep philosophical conversations, if they’ll stop bludgeoning me with their caustic opinions long enough to have a deep philosophical conversation, and maybe someday I will understand.