2.4 Kith and Kin.

A walk around the water puts you into birdland. A cornucopia of small birds and water fowl. Among the fowl are the ducks, the swans, and the geese, en masse. Of all of these, two pekin ducks, given to the city, made the strangest of characters. They stood out with their white bodies and their yellow beaks. They were dubbed John and Jackie. They were partners. They were the same, but they were different (from the Others). Together they were an odd duck. But they were always together. Part of their appeal was that they lived near the theatres of the Shakespearean festival, and their lives were a kind of theatre, a narrative, a love story.

One day something nefarious happened to Jackie, as may be the course of nature, and she was found dead. For a very long season thereafter, John could be heard in the distances, always, making a steady, enduring mournful cry, an aggrieved grief. He made the whole community aware that the narrative had turned to tragedy. For a period of time, John took up with a mallard. One day he disappeared. The curtain fell, and their story ended.

One aspect of a household is family, kith and kin. Your kith are the people that you know, your kin are the people that you are related to -- family and friends. Households make for strong boundaries. They hold people together. But a consequence of that is that they also create strong boundaries that keep people out. Family is at the pinnacle of our values, what we believe, and that which we cherish. Our practices or habits -- our praxis, are based on these values and beliefs. What we cherish is hard to change. 

What about the people that we are not related to and the people we do not know?

 

A supreme ideal which we apply to our family and household is 'unconditional love.' The easiest example of this is our children. This tends to develop naturally in a parent for their child. More recently I have realized that this kind of unconditional love, which we champion, is not really unconditional. It is typically conditioned upon the fact that these are our children. Unconditional love should not be limited by the boundaries of the household. We often speak colloquially about the importance of love. In a homogenized way, the word love often becomes bland, generic, and meaningless -- like a kind of quacking. 

Abraham was a wandering Aramean, a nomad. He is credited as being the father of three great religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. More than that, he was of the household of promise. What began as a bloodline, kith and kin, became a promise to include all nations, ethnos, all ethnic peoples, in the family. 

Inadvertently, homogenized white people captured that congregation, that family. They were just trying to do what they were supposed to, according to their values. They made it theirs, and they exterminated the differences. The irony was that we homogenized white people, were the differences. This was forgotten. We were the outsiders. We were the foreigners, outside of the family, then made heirs of the household. 

Edward de Bono, in his book, I am Right and You are Wrong, tells how we have developed a Western civilization based on arguments intended to exterminate the opponent's point of view. This is true of the courts, the schools, and the churches -- and now social medias. W. Edwards Deming, the father of Total Quality Management, whom we have noted previously, said that the place where we find quality and excellence is the place where we find error. Error points us to what we need to change, to grow into excellence. 

The diversity and the difference in John and Jackie could not be hidden. Their story was made plain, unusual, for all to see. What I need is a mechanism for self-reflection, a tool that examines my values and beliefs, even an autopsy, to see where I could gently change and grow. Finding growth means standing ready to find error, and errors in my thinking and practices. This growth would be into a greater household, a wider kith and kin, and closer to the silent sounding of the word love.