I've been thinking about the limits of my imagination

Exploring my limits and discovering new things is what's fun for me. I especially like putting together ideas or events that seem unrelated but which, in my imagination, tell a fresh tale or offer an interesting and inventive perspective on things. Though the wise author of Ecclesiastes wrote millennia ago, The sun also rises and the sun goes down, and there is nothing new under the sun, I still strive to be original, to string together thoughts or stories that no one (okay, at least not I) has put together before.

My most recent exploration of new ideas has tested the limits of my imagination about who I am, and these fresh discoveries are tantalizing to me.

By my early twenties, I’d had enough exposure to the urban world of Hollywood and Los Angeles to come into contact with people not like me. There were gay men among my father’s customers at his newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard, where I often worked with him on weekends. I played high school and college basketball with black teammates and opponents, often in gyms in their neighborhoods, and went to school with Latinos and Asians in the rapidly changing demographics of our student bodies. I was blessed with a large number of girls and eventually women who were close friends. And I met Jewish and Buddhist and eventually Muslims students, and predictably a growing number of agnostics and atheists, as I made my way through college.

But what I believed through those years was that I was in the mainstream of our common culture, and all these others were on the margins. I was straight, white, male, and Christian, and people like me were the standard of what it meant to be an American.

Thankfully, in the decades since my twenties, this division between the mainstream and the margins has disappeared. These diverse people and I were and are different, but in my soul our diversity is no longer defined by the mainstream and the margins but by the common humanity we share.

What changed me was what usually changes us from our small-minded bigotries to a more open-hearted acceptance: friendship. Once I was friends with LGBTQ+ people, with people of color, with a diverse collection of women friends, and with non-Christians, my attitudes toward them were transformed.

I initially engaged with these groups for two reasons: to understand them and to help them. I saw that the world we shared made it hard for them to be queer, to be a person of color, to be a woman, to be some religion other than Christian. The assumptions and expectations of our society laced every aspect of their daily existence with far more difficulty than I experienced by virtue of who I was, and that seemed deeply wrong to me.

So I asked questions, absorbed responses and, when it seemed worthy, spent time and money to fight for justice on their behalf.

It's reasonable to believe that a majority of queer people were initially confused by their same-sex attraction in a straight culture that defined them as deviant perverts and threats to our children. Certainly in previous decades of my life there were no visible examples of people living proud, queer lives nor was there language to describe the vast diversity of human love and affection.

Many queer people I have known internalized this confusion and the culture’s hatred of them, and battled homophobic disgust within themselves. Even as some of our culture has agreed to accept LGBTQ+ people and even to celebrate their choice of whom to love, they have remained outside the mainstream, still marginalized.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to be marginalized for being straight, or to be rejected because I love a woman? I try to imagine myself living with shame for my sexual self, afraid to be outed for being straight and, if I am outed, vilified for my attraction to women and seen as a threat to children. 

In my imagination, I wonder if there is room in my flexible identity to experience what it would be like to be marginalized for being straight, and what imagining that might lead me to realize about my own place in the world and my own experience of being human.

I’ve spent many hours over lunch in a local high-end restaurant with the only intimate black friend I’ve ever had, a man who has been my mentor. We've talked about what it’s like for him to live and love and work in our culture. He and I live in much the same world. We have children, work long hours, make good money, belong to various groups, worship the same God.

But from the center of this world we share, he still knows every day what I don’t know: he knows what it’s like to move through our shared world and be treated differently than I am because of the color of his skin.

When he fell in love with the white woman who has been his wife for fifty years, they had to move from their midwestern hometown to Los Angeles to escape the disappointment and rejection from both of their families. He worked at several jobs through college to get the degree he knew he needed to have a chance in a business culture that, even now, imposes limits on people of color that are not applied to white people.

His life has been a decades-long demonstration of that old saying, You have to work twice as hard to get half as far. His soul is inhabited by the knowledge that his ancestors came to this country in the hull of a slave ship, and this is an anchor in his otherwise free-floating optimism. Like so many people of color, he continues to work hard to overcome that sense our society imposes of being less than – less intelligent, less able to control his lustful passions, less reliable and responsible – the racist remnants of slavery and centuries of discrimination still inflicted upon people of color.

Even if I wanted to – frankly, fear keeps me from wanting to – I know I cannot crawl into the skin of any person of color. But perhaps I can imagine what it might be like to be hated for being white. I’m sure there are people of color who, with good reason, hate me, but they don’t threaten me with their anger or accost me on the streets, and any animosity they might bear me is personal, not structural - it might hurt my feelings, but it doesn't force me to the margins of the world I inhabit, keep me from getting a job, bar me from finding housing, or put the lives of my children at risk if they ring the wrong doorbell.

So I wonder what it would be like, all of my life, to be seen as less than, to have a dominant group of people let me know that they see me as less intelligent than they are, less responsible, less able to control my impulses just because of my white skin. What would it be like to live in a culture, even in a family, that is racist toward white people? What would it be like to fear the police because of my color? I try to imagine my white self, destined to live on these margins.

In recent years, women I know and love have educated me on what it’s like to be them in this culture, with particular focus on the dangers they face in daily life and the fear they have about someone assaulting them. My wife has been followed as she runs in the neighborhood. Two of my female work colleagues were fondled on crowded urban sidewalks, and all of them are careful when they walk by themselves or about where they park their cars.

Though they seldom articulate it directly, they’re afraid of being sexually assaulted, raped, or killed. In many cases, these legitimate fears keep women marginalized from the comfortable safety they’d like to live with, a safety I never doubt for myself.

I've seen a question asked online, in many variations, about this experience of living with constant held breath: if all men vanished for 24 hours, what would you do? Almost universally their responses are heartbreaking: I would go out for a walk when it's cool, late at night. I would leave my windows open to let the breeze in. I would sit in a forest by myself and listen to the trees. I would wear a bathing suit. I would just breathe.

I’m seldom afraid, seldom looking over my shoulder for someone who might assault me. I’m over six feet tall, weigh 250 pounds and, though I’m old at 82, I do not feel vulnerable. But I wonder what it would be like to learn to stay off the streets alone at night, to scan the sidewalks before I walk in certain parts of town, or think in advance about where to park my car or how to carry mace whenever I’m out and about.

I wonder what it would be like to know, day by day, that I could easily be overpowered by someone who wanted to take out their violence, their anger, their frustration on my body because I didn't smile back or give out my phone number or respond the "right" way to an obscene overture. I want to make room in my sense of myself for a vulnerability that could be true for me as a man, marginalized by a fear of being unsafe that I’m only now trying to imagine.

A few weeks after 9/11 in 2001, three angry men attacked a grocery store owner in our community and murdered him for what they assumed to be his Muslim religion, the religion of those who flew planes into our buildings The murderers assumed he was a Muslim because he wore a turban that actually identified him as a Sikh. My wife was the lawyer who represented his three children as they and their mother tried to recover from the tragedy.

Sikhs in turbans, Buddhist monks in saffron robes, Jewish men in Yarmulkas, and of course Muslim women in hijabs are all considered weird or somehow foreign to those for whom only Christianity is the true American religion.

I want to imagine what it would be like for me if being a Christian was considered weird or foreign. What if the cross I’ve worn for fifty years or the fact that I go to a Christian church most Sundays marked me as a strange person whose religion is out of line with what is expected of a true American?

What if people of other faiths identified me as part of the religious culture that historically opposed equal citizenship to people of color, or if being a Christian makes me one with our Christian communities - Baptist, Roman Catholic, Mormon - who refuse to allow women into positions of leadership and deny them control of their reproductive rights?

How marginal, how odd and primitive I must be, in the eyes of non-Christians, to celebrate communion every Sunday by eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus.  What a barbaric form of devotion. And why would the wider society allow such a strange and brutal religion to claim any place of religious privilege in this wildly diverse religious culture?

It’s not that difficult for me to make room in my imagination to experience what it would be like to be marginalized because of my religious convictions.

A friend asked me recently how long I’ve been the Rick Thyne I now assume myself to be. I think my current sense of who I am took root sometime in my early twenties. That’s when I first knew that I was part of the dominant culture, a straight, white, male, Christian in a diverse society. But I was also a curious and empathetic young man, and decades of empathy and curiosity have led me to a place where I’m now comfortable in a diverse human family.

In this stage of my life, I know more about what it is like to be myself, and more about the deep unfairness of the world I inhabit alongside all my human relatives, many of whom experience that marginalization I have escaped, day in and day out, simply for being themselves.

The injustice of the world is not new - but perhaps there is something new under the sun, and it’s a deeper capacity in me to not just sympathize with the plight of those who suffer and to work on their behalf, but to truly expand my own inner sense of self, to imagine myself in other bodies, other identities, other life paths, and to stretch the bounds of my imagination to encompass the many Rick Thynes I might have been, had the accidents of my birth placed me in different circumstances.

Author's Note: Thank you for your support in reading these posts and commenting on them. You’re a stimulating and thoughtful audience to write to. This is my last column for this season. I’ll be back again in September.  Have a peaceful, restful summer.