This is the recounting of two events that changed my white-liberal-polyanna life. It is about what is safety. I tell these to say how the past lives in the present, and what I learned about being in the present with someone who still feels the past.

The first is the story of a young woman of color I met in a particular community. I was fascinated with her, and I tried so hard to get to know her. There was always a wall she would not see me through. In a session with the leader of that community, who mentioned how hard it was for this young woman to function in such a white group, how isolated she felt-- I said, "Well, it would help if she would look around." The leader jumped all over me quite loudly and also, somehow lovingly, and explained that the burden of getting through, like it or not, would be upon ME, not the young woman. She could step past that wall any time, true. But if I wanted contact, it would be on me to step through first, and properly.

She said to me, "It isn't fair, but it's so. If you want to get close enough to her for her to see you at all, if you want her to allow you access to get close enough to invite her past that wall, you will have to take her where she is at and go first." And I learned that whatever I might think someone could do, or should do, to overcome the results of past mistreatment they had experienced personally or had been handed down to them, the reality was that none of the dialog I longed for, and hoped could help them, would ever even begin if I did not step past my own stuff first.

The second event was that I chose to attend an Israeli dance troupe's performance in the Chicago area. I wasn't thinking when I bought my ticket, what I was signing on for. Ever hear of Skokie? Nazi marches? The dancers would be, it "just so happens," at the Skokie Jewish Community Center. Made sense to me. But when I arrived, alone, oh my. I sat in this huge auditorium surrounded by Jews, surrounded by Skokie, and all I could think of was the bomb that could be under my seat. And all around me were laughing, friendly, kind, funny people acting as though they had not a care in the world.

Are you afraid of needles, or flying, or snakes, or anything unreasonable? It was like that. I could hardly breathe. I didn't know if I could stay. My whole body was demanding flight. I made myself stay because I was unwilling to be less brave than the actual potential targets. They face this every day!!! I thought a lot about Germany, as I waited for the curtain to rise on the performance. I thought about what I would have done. I found The Diary of Anne Frank, suddenly, a whole different story. I was desperate to think of anything that would let me stay put.

The curtain rose. Out from the wings of the stage tumbled the troupe. Here I was, fearing death, and here they were, more full of life than anything I had ever seen. Young. Vibrant, free, beautiful, free, free... FREE. It was then that I learned what it means to dance like no one is watching. And I thought, how wrong of me, to sit there feeling that I should be spared a possible attack because I was not Jew and also had not done anything wrong. It was wrong also to think these people around me should be spared, for they too had done nothing wrong.

It was the wrong point to look at, at all. The point was, live. Fully. Knowing how awful life can be, live. Live BIG. Live LOUD. Dance in the face of it. Die THAT way.

You see, these Jews had not forgotten the past. They had redeemed it. They had gone far beyond "getting over" it. They had gone so far past it that I had never realized how far there is to go, and it was only when they felt safe among themselves that they could show it freely enough for me to glimpse it. That's why we don't forget genocide of any sort. Not because we don't want to repeat it. Of course we don't. Even dogs know not to make the same mistake twice. We humans have a greater opportunity, to lift our whole people up past what has gone before. To take a wrong and make a right that could not have been, otherwise.

I have never told this story to a Jew. It seemed too much like, "Some of my best friends are Jewish." But here is the secret. When I look someone in the eyes now, I think that they see me, not the wall I saw before. Because they see me looking at them, expecting that same measure of life that I saw in the dancers. They step past the wall they see, because I have come out from behind mine as much as I can in that moment.

I have walked many a mile since, in many a sort of shoes. (It's one of those cliches that you only get if you actually try it, and are paying attention.) And I would risk death gladly for the privilege of walking in more shoes that way, to have the chance of seeing my world more clearly, more fully, more lovingly. Once you wear someone's shoes, loving them is effortlessly different.

~Susan