Dealing With Differences, by Debbie Tuma

It’s been only a month since I returned from Dallas, where I, like thousands of other tourists, had visited many of its well-known attractions, including the Fairmont Dallas Hotel with its famous Venetian Room, centered in the largest arts district in the country, the 560-foot Reunion Tower, and the Sixth Floor Museum. It was there, in the former Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy out of a sixth-floor window. Like the other visitors, from as far away as Australia and Canada, I was moved as I looked out that window ledge to the highway below, in Dealey Plaza, where the exact spot of the assassination is marked with an X on the street. 

This violence struck me as senseless even back in grade school in Montauk, where I heard about Kennedy’s assassination sitting at my desk, and it struck me again last month in Dallas, as I played the scene over in my mind, 50 years later. Even in the Sixth Floor Museum, visited daily by people from all over the world, with storyboards, films, and photos all over the walls, no one is really sure what actually happened or why. One theory had to do with President Kennedy’s support of the civil rights movement, and later the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King furthered this belief.

Today, we are still watching the TV as CNN shows live footage of more violence in Dallas — the shooting of 11 police officers, five of whom died. By a sniper who was out to get white cops, in protest of their treatment of blacks. It sadly seems that five decades later not much has changed. People still look at the differences in their fellow man and tend to stay in their own circles. 

I thought back to East Hampton High School during the 1960s when we got our first exchange student, from Turkey. Back then, most of the roughly 600 students in the school were Caucasians — we had only a few African-American students, barely any Latinos, and almost no Asians. The Turkish girl could hardly speak English, and she dressed and looked different from us. At first most of the kids did not socialize with her. 

I had a different reaction. Having always been around people who were “just like me,” I was excited to meet someone from a different culture and saw it as a learning experience. I couldn’t wait to find out about her life in Turkey, and all I wanted to do was ask her questions, which was hard because of the language barrier. But gradually she learned English, and stayed in Montauk with her aunt until many years later. I never did make it to Turkey, but I learned so much from knowing her.

In high school I learned more about the world, not so much from studying history and geography but by hearing the firsthand stories of my English teacher, Eunice Juckett Meeker, who was a travel writer on the side. Every vacation, she would be trekking off to some exotic country and coming back to tell us about windsurfing in Tahiti or buying cuckoo clocks in Germany.

Years later, in college during the Cold War with Russia in the early 1970s, my Russian history professor persuaded me to take a tour of that country, under communism at the time. I had fears at first about my room being bugged and about Big Brother watching me throughout my trip. I thought the Russians were the enemy, and they would not like me over there. But when I got there, at 22 years old, I found to my surprise that they were just as curious about me as I was about them. They wanted to buy my jeans and my gum. In exchange, they gave me their little gold patriotic pins of Russian leaders. They asked me nonstop questions about the United States.

“Is it true that everyone in America lives in a mansion, has two cars and two TVs, and you get shot at when you get off the plane or boat in New York City?” they asked. Back then, the Russian people had to live with propaganda from their government, which wanted to keep them uninformed about the outside world. Luckily, most people under 30 spoke English, so we could converse.

Once we had a dialogue about our different cultures, it brought us closer. I no longer felt they were the enemy. One night, we sat with a bunch of students from Moscow State University in a beautiful garden restaurant, poured the vodka, and toasted our astronauts and theirs. As the night went on, I felt a bond that I’d never expected, and realized that we were not that different after all.

I knew at that moment that I wanted to travel. I wanted to learn more about other cultures and celebrate the diversity of the human race. I wanted to allow myself to experience more of the differences and grow to understand them. 

At a street fair in Mattituck recently, I met Karen Seader of Selden, who has created a program to teach this to young children. She feels that inspiring children to embrace our differences and accept other cultures is our only hope. A children’s author, singer, and entertainer, she performs an interactive show called “In Your Heart Lives a Rainbow” to promote love, unity, and respect of others. She takes her musical storytelling program to schools, camps, libraries, organizations, and events across the Island and the tristate area for children in pre-K to second grade.

“I see how excited and open young children are. My goal is to reach them at the foundational ages and open their hearts to see people of the world as one family. That way, maybe we can change the world, one child at a time,” Seader said. And many teachers are doing similar programs, teaching tolerance and understanding as part of the school curriculum.

Sometimes, living so far east on the tip of an island, we get isolated in our provincial way of life and way of thinking.

I thought about how my family used to eat fish every night for dinner, growing up in Montauk. When the first Chinese restaurant, Ping’s, finally arrived, back in the 1960s, the food seemed weird and different, and I didn’t want to eat it. The only time I’d ever heard of China was when I dug holes in the sand at the beach, and my mother used to say, “Be careful, you’ll dig all the way to China,” and I was scared that I might disappear.

But after a while, it became my favorite food, and out of curiosity, when I grew up, I chased it all the way to China.

Debbie Tuma is a freelance writer and a host at WLNG Radio. She lives in Riverhead and can be reached at [email protected].