"What's the big deal?"

[madamesilverspurs]

An afternoon at the laundromat found me reading a day-old newspaper. I glanced up to notice that one of my neighbors had just come in. We nodded in greeting and she proceeded down the row of washers to find available machines. I’d pulled the crossword puzzle out of the paper and had just started it when the neighbor took a seat and picked up the newspaper I’d just set down. Thirty-something with a couple of kids, working part time at a realty office, husband a line manager at the meatpacking plant. Anyway, after a couple of minutes she tossed the paper down, shook her head and said that she just didn’t get why people get so upset at that stuff.

So, more to be polite than anything else, I asked “What stuff?”

“This,” she said, as she pointed to the story about events transpiring in Israel. “It’s not like it’s real or anything.”

I asked what she meant, and she said her father had long ago taught them that Israel was a made-up country, like in fairy tales, a place that preachers talk about when telling stories to teach people how to act.

It took a minute for me to get my bearings after that, but I was eventually able to respond by saying that the country does, in fact, exist. She looked at me as though I’d sprouted a second head. I picked up the newspaper, which had a small map in the story; I used my pencil to sketch in a larger (albeit somewhat crude) map of Africa, Europe and Asia Minor, with the Mediterranean and Italy prominent (she at least knew that Italy exists). She still looked a little doubtful, so I suggested that there was lots of interesting history about the place, that there are reasons that we pay attention, and that the library might be a good place to start.

That conversation took place in 1982. When I next saw that neighbor, a couple weeks later, she said she'd looked at some maps and was thinking about going to the library. Shortly after, I moved across town and haven’t seen her since. But I do think of her every time someone opines “What’s the big deal?” when Israel is in the news.

[SheilaT]

1. There are probably many more people like that out there than we realize.

Some years ago I read on on-line post by someone who taught English at the University of Pittsburgh. He said that many of his students were the first ones in their family to ever go to college, which is a significant accomplishment. He also kept on coming across students who similarly didn't think that other countries were entirely real, including one young woman who honestly thought that no Japanese people existed before WWII, that somehow they'd burst into existence then. He offered that as a somewhat extreme example, but found that the pockets of ignorance he ran up against to be disturbing.