Perhaps Our Differences Aren’t As Big As You Would Think…

There is a line in the sand. On one side the grains are painted blue, flecked with a bluejay vibrancy that is striking and beautiful.  The other is painted red; it is deep and royal. Grand, even.

I gravitate more towards the left– I recognize more similarities over there. I see my mother. I see my father. I see men and women whom I have long admired.

But I see you, too, over on the other side. I recognize that this score in the ground has made us feel pitted against each other. It divides us. This line shouts out nasty things like baby killer and homophob. It highlights our differences without taking into consideration all that we have in common.

This line implies to us that because we stand opposite each other that we cannot be friends. We cannot agree. We cannot get along.

But I am not a woman of lines.

My feet need only lift themselves over that mark and I am longer burdened with over-simplified words like party, group, or affiliation. I am free to walk wherever I want, traipsing in the sand at my own free will.

And today I am done. Today I am a woman whose allegiance lies only with morally just. Not red. Not blue. Not white, nor black, nor brown, nor yellow.

This world is made of beaches; of waters that tug at their edges, reshaping them with the ebb and flow of the tides.

Colors and lines, groups and classes– these are all faulty, human-made partitions, created to differentiate between me and you, us and them.

But nature knows that these designations are useless and that nothing is permanent. Nature has worn the marks of time and understands that the winds will shift the sands; downpours will bounce blue grist onto red.

And yet again the beach will be reshaped. Reborn.

Friends, we do not have time to learn this lesson the long way. While we stand here arguing over fault and blame and point out the weaknesses of each other’s opinions, we are missing the battle that is raging around us.

There is so much fear. So much hate. There are misinformation campaigns armed with words that come at us at a million miles an hour.

The colors, and lines, and words all create a framework whose only goal is division.

Perhaps it is time that we remembered that the world is not a grid. And there are no lines but the ones that we let people draw around us.

Fuck. The. Lines.

I am sick of boundaries. I want to scream and kick that line in the sand until it is dissolved. Obliterated.

I want to take those blue grains and throw them on the red. I want to mix it all up until all that is left is an exhausted woman making sand-angels on her back on a beach that is colorless.