Meridian Magazine :: Journey into Autumn: Celebrating Diversity

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Celebrating Diversity
By Richard Eyre

Editor's note: This weekly column focuses on physical and spiritual journeys, the autumn of life, notes on life's passage, and the life of a seeker. Read the first column here.

Journey

Toronto is perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the world these days. We've been there a lot in the past couple of years, including three days last week, and we have a newfound and more personal interest in the area because my brother has just been called to serve there for the next three years as mission president. (He has some big shoes to fill, considering those who have served in that mission in the past — President Monson and Elder Ballard come to mind.)

With active immigration from all over Asia, Africa, and Europe, half of Toronto's population was born elsewhere. This creates wonderful diversity! And wonderful restaurants with every kind of cuisine one can imagine. The city has been described as "not so much a melting pot but a mosaic" because its extensive and widespread immigration have formed a myriad of ethnic neighborhoods, each sporting their own style, their own food, their own culture.

The local media and press in Toronto refer to "visual minorities." This is a useful term, since all of us are minorities. (It's just that if we are Irish or Swedish, we are less "visual" or less easy to spot as a minority.)

I love diversity! Think with me about the word for a minute. Think about the diversity of your own family. Aren't you glad your kids are each so unique and different from each other. One thing I love so much about being a father is that each of my kids are so totally unique, so very different from each of their brothers and sisters. We love being united and sharing all that we have in our family, but at the same time, we are so grateful and appreciative (and admiring) of our differences.

We have some new neighbors who have more "visual" diversity than we do, because four of their children are adopted and bring a racial difference to go with all their personality differences. I love and am drawn to such families, and I admire parents who adopt kids from the third world or from unfortunate circumstances and give them a chance for everything!

I think Heavenly Father must love diversity because He is the designer of it. Just look at the abundant variety in the earth He has created. Everywhere! One reason I love hiking and horseback riding is to get out and see the amazing diversity of nature. One reason I love scuba diving is to see the diversity underwater!

There must have been a design contest in the Pre-Existence for tropical fish. Maybe there were prizes for the most colorful, the most humorous, the most outrageous! Just when you think you have seen everything while diving, along comes something even more bizarre.

And isn't the greatest of all of God's created diversity manifest in His own children? Aren't you glad we don't all look the same? Have you fully appreciated the different kinds of beauty that exist within the human race? Think of all the ways that hair can be different, or eyes, or skin tones.

My daughter Saydi, who is a social worker, once had her office in a part of New York City that was so diverse and multi-racial and multi-cultural that I used to enjoy just standing on the street and trying to identify what part of the world passerbys came from. It is harder and harder to answer that question, by the way, because people come from everywhere, intermarry and have wonderfully blended children who often inherit the best features (and, doctors tell us, the strongest genetics and immune characteristics of both sides) and are thus beautiful in still another unique way.

Perhaps the polar opposite of appreciating diversity is something that we call prejudice--the idea that people who do not look like we do, or act like we do, or have the same culture as we do are somehow less for it, and somehow not as worthy of our friendship or interest. Sadly, most wars are caused by some kind of prejudice or bigotry, though it always goes by some other name; so an alternative way of saying it would be that conflict and strife are always caused by some degree of the lack of appreciation for diversity. Some have suggested that the only time racial or cultural prejudice will end is when there is enough inter marriage or breeding that we all look the same (or at least that we can't tell the race or nationality of anyone and therefore can't label people or make them objects of bigotry or prejudice.)

I hope that doesn't happen. I hope nothing happens that reduces diversity and pares down the possibilities for uniqueness. I think the best world would be where diversity increases, even as unity grows. If a 1 and a 2 could combine to produce a 3, and later on a 7 and a 9 could generate a 16, so that the number of possibilities grows, perhaps diversity could increase even as ancient cultures are preserved so that we end up with more and more to appreciate and to learn from.

Someone once asked me how I would feel if one of my children married a person of another race. I'm sure the question was not prejudicial in its intent, but it still shocked me a little. The answer is that I would feel wonderful about it! If the love and commitment and belief were all there, I would see the racial difference as a net strength, as an added blessing that would bring still greater diversity and beauty to our family.

Autumn

Supposedly, in the "traditional wisdom" of things, people become more and more socially and politically and economically conservative as they grow older. This notion is based partially I suppose on the premise that conservatism protects the status quo and that older people want to keep what they have and keep everything the way they are used to having it.

But I think there are many for whom this process works in reverse. As they enter the Autumn of their lives, they are more traveled, more broad-minded, and more tolerant and appreciative of customs, ideas, and appearances other than their own. The wider perspective with which they view the world causes them, in a way, to grow more liberal if the word is defined as an interest in repairing the inequities in the world and making changes that exhibit compassion, empathy and the equality of all rather than protectionism, isolation and superiority of the few.

Of course, there is always a danger of going too far with our wishes for equality. One of my political heroes, Margaret Thatcher, (we lived in England while she was Prime Minister) said "We must choose between equality and equality of opportunity, for we can never have both." She meant, of course, that the only way to achieve equality in a society of unique individuals, is to force it in a way that removes equality of opportunity.

Which takes us to a larger spiritual paradigm and brings to mind the war in heaven where one plan was presented that involved coercion and suggested problem-less equality for us all. The other plan involved agency and the freedom to move ahead or fall behind.

Notes

I have been trying to write, for years, a book or at least a good series of articles on what I think is one of the most thought-stimulating scriptures of all, the admonition in Isiah 58:12 to be "repairers of the breach." Isaiah was writing to our time, and the breach of which he spoke is the gap between the rich and poor, a gap that gets wider every year. The breach can be thought of globally, where s few nations control the vast majority of wealth, and where nearly half of mankind sleeps on dirt floors and is constantly hungry. The breach can also be thought of in America, where we have the richest of the rich, but where we also have ghettos with some of the worst living conditions in the world.

This week, as I write, I am back from Toronto and playing in a national tennis tournament at a country club in a gated community, surrounded by very wealthy people in the autumn and winter of their lives who seem (though one should never judge) to be putting most of their effort into becoming even more comfortable and into shutting out any of the world that could remind them of less pleasant things or disrupt their comfort level.

Ironically, I am going from here to a conference in the Bay area called the Global Philanthropy Forum, which is largely a collection of social entrepreneurs who are trying to find ways to help the poorest of the poor throughout the world.

So my notes this week are juxtapositioned between two very different worlds, and I look forward to sharing them next column.

Seeker

So what do we seek? Perhaps one thing is a cause. Even though we often seem to have enough personal problems and needs to use up all our time and mental energy, we know, deep down, that all men and women need a cause--something to which they are truly and deeply devoted, and sometimes it needs to be something more specific and personally unique than the Church (although, for all of us who believe, The Gospel should be at the center of whatever cause we embrace).

I continue to feel that the greatest cause is the Family. Didn't you love Elder Ballard's conference talk on mothers, and on the surpassing importance of the work of families (and on what husbands can do for their wives)? All the sermons were good, and so many touched on family. And why not? After all, in the words of President Lee, "The Church is the scaffolding with which we build eternal families." The family is the government of God. And here on earth, strong families are the only way to a strong society. No one understands this as well as the adversary, who focuses his strongest and most destructive efforts on undermining family.

I admire all those who are so active trying to defend the family and to protect it from forces that break it down. My own cause though, is more to celebrate the family and to find ways to catalyze things that build it up. For years, our mission statement (Linda's and mine, as we write and speak to parents) has been "FORTIFY FAMILIES by popularizing parenting, bolstering balance, and validating values."

Of course, the deepest cause, for any of us, is to fortify our own families, to repair them where needed, to strengthen and serve individual members, and to be united in our pursuit of exaltation. It is the ultimate cause, and the ultimate joy.

Thanks for reading. See you next week as I continue to hope that something in my journeying and seeking will be helpful to you in yours.

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About the Author:

A former Mission President in London and candidate for Utah governor, Richard was the director of the White House Conference on Parents and Children for President Reagan. He served on the President's advisory panel for secondary and higher education. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, he headed a management consulting company for 20 years before giving it up to meet the growing demands of his writing and speaking schedule.

Richard and his wife Linda are parents of nine children and authors of a dozen bestselling family and parenting books. They are now focusing on the phase they are entering: Empty Nest Parenting. Through their web sites valuesparenting.com and familynightlessons.com, their frequent national media appearances and theirspeaking and lecture tours (see http://www.theeyres.com/), they continue to work at their mission statement which is, "FORTIFY FAMILIES, popularize parenting, bolster balance, and validate values."