From despair to contemplation to small actions
“You have a small United Nations here,” a patient said approvingly when I worked at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. The hospital is located close to a neighborhood of the African immigrant diaspora. UMMC is the local health care provider and employer for many immigrants and the tertiary research hospital for those in the region.
We had aging patients from small towns near the Canadian border with hearing problems, and staff with varied accents. I encountered conflicts I didn’t understand, and relied on staff to explain them to me.
Why did the Ethiopian patient insist that no Somali staff work with him? I told him scheduling had many variables, and ethnic preference was not a permissible criterion. Another African immigrant explained to me that Ethiopian and Somali refugees congregated in camps in the other country, which caused hostility and resentment.
A black aide graciously cared for a man who had been shot in the spine, making him a paraplegic. His chest and biceps were covered with white supremacist and Nazi tattoos. I asked her how she did it. She replied that it was her role to be a caregiver. She employed a zen-like detachment with other difficult patients, too.
I had called in the assessment team for this patient. He had ordered flak jackets and other military paraphernalia by mail. The assessment team did not regard him as a danger. Paramilitary preparations were his interest.
It is difficult for me to assess threats far outside my experience. On some matters, I have a very either/or, right or wrong point of view.
Our diversity as a country is our strength. It gives me hope. DEI — diversity, equity, inclusion programs — are under attack. We are both a community and a collection of individuals.
When I was a manager, diversity gave me many points of view, whether the diversity was in professional discipline, ethnicity, sexual identity, geography, or a long list of other possibilities.
In this difficult time, diversity is a reality that gives me hope. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle, nor would we want to. I rely on different points of view for understanding, for perspective. It is what keeps me coming back to these pages.
Marketers understand that demographics cut many ways, and people are intersectional. I am not simply defined by being retired, a mother, a woman, or a writer—I am all of those things and more.
I also belong to a group that celebrates contemplation and action. I am a pragmatist, so the woo-woo of prayer and meditation seems woo — until it doesn’t.
I can’t explain the energy in the universe and why it shifts the way it does. If I take the longer view of history, I can see that after seven decades, we have had fraught times and times of progress all mixed up together, as we do now.
There is a sliver of truth in whatever alternate reality is being proposed. I acknowledge that sliver, even if the consequences of the overreaction are larger than I can stomach.
We are both individuals and communities.
The energy is real. I endorse contemplation and action. Being gathered in communities, in-person or online, has helped. The many voices help. Isolation does not help. Talking helps. Reading helps. Writing helps.
My first job after school in Minnesota was in New York City, working for the state Human Rights Division. I worked in what was then known as affirmative action. Two generations later, it is gratifying to see the cumulative results of that work, and our families, workplaces, and marketplaces are too diverse to roll it all back. Oh, some of it is being rolled back, in our stutter-step dance of forward, sideways, backwards.
The woman who was hospitalized and thought the United Nations staffing was positive, scrutinized me later when she was less drugged. “I used to work for you.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged.
“You were a very fair boss,” she said. She paused, thinking, “You fired me.”
“Yes,” I said again.
She nodded, able to hold conflicting experiences at the same time.
It’s what we need to do in this world: hold conflicting information. Globalization is the reality for canola farmers in the open fields of North Dakota or the Mexican Americans who have always lived in Texas. (“I didn’t move. My family didn’t move. The border and the country have changed, several times.”)
Like many, I felt frozen in place in January. But we woke up the next morning, and the next. And I hope to wake up again, in contemplation and action.
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