DEAR SAL

I came across your name on Facebook, a website that can bring people together or drive them apart, depending on who we are talking about. Apparently, we are the same age, 71 years old give or take, and seem to have grown up in the same neighborhood on Long Island. Maybe we knew each other, by name, by face, back in the day.

At the time of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 just past, you chose to comment on a posted photo of 3rd grade students from my old neighborhood elementary school back in 1973, fifty-three years ago. These school photos do tend to look alike, an earnest teacher standing by twenty or so smiling, enthusiastic youngsters with open eyes to hopeful days ahead. In this particular photo, the one that drew your attention, one of the youngsters was fondly remembered for his kindness, his intelligence---and his tragic demise 28 years later in one of the World Trade Center towers. The comments to the post were all one would hope for in a mournful time of tragic remembrance.

Except yours.

You wrote simply how nice all white kids with a smiling emoji of a kid that quite frankly, Sal, appears to be yellow.

People called you moron, stupid, idiot, insensitive.

You called them low life and extolled the virtues of living now in your all-white Florida neighborhood.

I’m not going to go there with you, Sal. There is no point. Perhaps you’ve worked hard, been good to the people in your life, enjoyed grandchildren who revel in the spring training Mets games you take them to. Just maybe they’re in 3rd grade now like those 1973 youngsters in the photo taken 53 short years ago. Perhaps they call you Papa and think you are the greatest. I don’t know. I don’t know you. Don’t know anything about you beyond what I’ve said.

And those five words.

That is enough to know that anything I say will be rejected by you out of hand as I am a Jewish man whose mother survived the Holocaust to work with and enjoy friendships with as many people as possible of all religions and colors, from Black to white and everything in between.

As we both know, Sal, virtually everyone who hates Blacks and wants them as far away as possible feels the same way about Jews.

So, Sal, I am really writing to those grandchildren, all the grandchildren really.

Kids, Sal is Italian and I am Jewish. We both grew up in a suburban neighborhood that was a pretty good place to grow up. Jews, Italians, Irish, Blacks, all going to the same schools, playing on the same ballfields, going to the same hamburger joints, pizzerias and movie theatres. It wasn’t perfect. Some people had more money. Some people did better in school. Some were better athletes, more popular, more confident. People were teased, sometimes worse, for their voices, their eyeglasses, their acne, their religion, their color, their clothing, their choice of friends. We were, after all, just kids.

I was accosted on occasion in the middle school boy’s room by an Italian American classmate who regularly forgot his lunch money and wanted some of mine. I was once mugged, they called it jumped, by a group of Italian American peers who walked around 9th grade with fancy leather gang jackets that seemed to give them superpowers. It didn’t make me dislike Italian Americans. In fact, I married one and we’re still at this love thing 43 years later. Her Italian American father had been confronted with the same decisions a generation earlier---follow the leader and do wrong or make good individual choices based purely on character---and you know what he did. Her Italian American mother was possibly the smartest person I have ever met. I miss them both terribly.

I live for Italian food. I consider Italy my favorite place in the world to escape to. I think Leonardo da Vinci may have been the most talented human being ever. I fantasized on more than one youthful occasion about Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. You get the picture.

And I’m well aware, and you should be too, that Italy was not Italy for thousands of years, divided among Papal States, Byzantines, Lombards, and more kingdoms and trade groups than I could ever keep track of. That Italy lies smack in the middle of a European continent that has been at the country border shift and ruler-encouraged hate game for so long amidst thousands of years of war.

So that was, and remains, America’s promise. Oceans away. Younger, unburdened by generations of passed-down prejudice and pure greed. One nation. But too often, we have been at war all over the globe for what we’re told is national self-interest that has done little for the nation or the self. And perhaps more damaging in the long run, we have been at war with ourselves, with those beautiful ideals we set down long ago in writing.

Black/White. Republican/Democrat. Southern/Northern. City/Rural. Rich Beyond Reason/Everyone Else.

We will always have differences. Differences make for better food, better music, better conversation, greater learning opportunities. We just cannot have one nation when the differences rule.

So kids, love your Papa for who he is. Your grandfather. The guy who helped put that roof over your heads, put that food on your table, put that pen and paper in your knapsack, got you that iPhone. And then run, don’t walk, to the nearest library and open your eyes and minds to all of the unbelievably heroic and brilliant things Black men and Black women have done, against all odds of oppression sent their way for hundreds of years. Get out there and dance with anyone and everyone, to music sent your way by anyone and everyone. Learn a second language, any one of hundreds out there. Then learn a third, the language of love that requires you to stop putting generations of frustration and the ignorance and hatred of your own grandfather on anyone else. It’s surprisingly easy to learn.

Part of the aftermath in the still vivid horrors of 9/11 is that we absolutely must find a way to minimize the hatred, especially organized hate, and quickly. It has beset every inch of this world of ours for thousands of years and it will be up to you to realize that it is the hatred itself that never produces a happy ending. Be kind. Be the leader of your own life. Resist the easy temptation of blaming someone else. It doesn’t work. Ultimately somewhere inside you will know you’re not fooling anyone, especially yourself, and it will eat away at your soul like acid. Take a real good look at and real good listen to Papa Sal. You’ll know what I mean. Kindness is so much more enjoyable and sustainable and shockingly contagious.

We’re counting on you.