Why Can’t We All Be Friends?

A few days ago, I published a statement something like “Why can’t we all be friends?” I got a little push back on it, something about White supremacy, I think.

There are a couple of blogs in here about stereotyping and I won’t repeat that here, but the tendency to stereotype people contributes heavily to our inability to be friends. White people will approach a Black man as if he represented everything the White person ever heard or believed about “Black people.” Likewise, a Black person approaching a White person. Some would have you believe that all White people are white supremacists, or that all Black people are violent.

If you know of some Democrats who have lied about something, that doesn’t make all Democrats liars. Same for Republicans. If there are cops who are abusive toward Black people, it doesn’t mean Cops are all racists. If some Black Lives Matter advocates have looted and burned stores, it doesn’t mean Black Lives Matters supporters are all rioters.

Our granddaughter Rachel loves to call her Granny on her new phone and talk on and on about whatever. Yesterday Granny couldn’t talk so Rachel called me. We got to reminiscing about a song we once learned together awhile back. I was teaching some older teens how to lead songs in our a Capella group. One of the things I needed them to understand was that if you are going to lead singing regularly, you need to be able to make a fool of yourself and just plow on, unaffected. Toward that end we all performed “All God’s Creatures Got a Place in The Choir” for the rest of the church after services one Sunday morning. We all made fools of ourselves and considering that done, we would not be embarrassed by mistakes we might make as we led the singing for the church.

The song, “All God’s Creatures…”, has a message very similar to one presented in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 where Paul writes that we are all a part of the body, yet we are all different. We all have different roles. We can no more get along without one member than a body could easily go on without a hand or an eye.

“All God’s creatures got a place in the choir,
Some sing low, some sing higher,
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire,
Some just clap their hands, or paws or anything they got there.”

 Why can’t we all be friends?