June 6, 2012

Today, diversity is on my mind. God made diversity. People don't seem to be able to afford it. We aim lower. We unify and minimize and standardize and mass-produce. But there I go saying “we.” On my own shores, I don't minimize or standardize much, but I look around and see it happening, and then my shoreline dissolves and I find myself standing in line in some air-conditioned bank lobby, walking on a bleak cement sidewalk, or staring dumbly at the magazines and candy bars in some grocery checkout. All these places have been designed to keep people in order, and I'm people, too, I guess. So I have to say “we” sometimes, but it seems to me that “we” and “me” are two different people, and one of us is out of order.
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One summer while I was in college, I worked as a peach-picker, at an orchard on a hillside overlooking Lake Dardanelle near Russellville, Arkansas. Mornings were spent walking tree-to-tree, picking the peaches that looked ready, filling the owner's ancient Ford flatbed with battered wooden crates of fresh peaches. Afternoons were spent under the rusty tin roof of the sorting shed, where the morning's pick was sorted and packed. Based on size, peaches were rolled down a chute into a nicer, slightly newer crate. There were four chutes: Small, Medium, Large, and Bad. Bad peaches had a gouge or a rotten place or some other unsellable flaw. When these crates filled, they were loaded onto another truck, to be hauled to the train station or a local grocery store. 
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Us workers could have all of the bad peaches we wanted; the rest went to the local churches for distribution to the needy. 
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Now, I mention this because I go through life being sorted pretty much the same way those peaches were. I feel like my value is determined with only a glance, except instead of  physical dimensions, it is economic dimensions that count: do I have a Small, Medium, or Large bank account. But I must be none of the above, because I always seem to end up rolling down that fourth chute. 
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Like I was saying, God made diversity. The grocery stores of Russellville had nice little displays of perfect peaches. But you could step outside and look down the street, where shabby people were milling around at the back of the church. Blessed were the poor, who got the assorted “bad” peaches, the ones that wouldn’t sell. Their lunches (and mine too, that summer) were not so predictable. 
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Let me close with my only other peach story: As I said, the orchard had been located on a hillside above Lake Dardanelle where, as it happened, a nuclear power plant—Arkansas Nuclear One—was under construction. All summer as we walked through the orchard picking peaches, we could look down the slope and watch the bulldozers and the cement trucks below, going to and fro in the earth, pushing dirt up and down in it. Almost twenty years later I was telling my peach-picking story to a friend, and she got all excited. She knew something I didn't. She had been a news reporter at the time, and had interviewed the owner of the orchard. She told me this: shortly after Nuclear One was fired-up, the peach trees started dying. Within months the entire orchard was dead. The owner sued the power company. The lawsuit made headlines (thus the interview) but ultimately he lost the case, since he was unable to prove beyond a shadow of doubt any connection between the nuclear power plant and his dead trees.
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So I guess I have to admit that there are times when “we” can be a very worthwhile point of view to espouse. But the owner of that orchard got stuck with being an “I.” We all did.
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