Coming from a very religious family who frankly despised all humans who were not white Christian straight men. I wanted nothing of this attitude to enter my mind. At 9 I walked away from baptism and never again gave a single thought to a spiritual God. At 13 I entered a private girls boarding school with an enormous library and access to the library at UCLA. This particular school was secular and we had girls from all over the world who had many Gods. We were forbidden to discuss religious but after hours, in the dorm rooms we learned from each other how this old world worked. What an education I had there.
I listened to the stories from our Jewish students what hatred can do to the individual. We listened to the stories from the Middle Eastern nations how they resented Israel. We all celebrated when Israel got their very own nation. We danced in the street around the campus. We learned from each other how to stop the hatred and we all became humanists although no such word was in use at that time.
We drew closer in 1948 when one of us saw her father hang himself and my father was too drunk to make the turn on Sunset Blvd and died and then a third saw her father shoot her mother’s boyfriend. It was a March never to be forgotten. We were a team and we got through it. That’s what humanists do.
It is the ability to join up to face the tragedies that hit us all. We kept each other sane and to try and stop the horrors of grief. We humanists often get involved in charity work where we can help hand’s on. I ended up working for Hospice and Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Secular is just a simple adjective to further explain us.
The best example of this attitude in the world of television is met by Gene Roddenberry. There is no color, religion or superior part of any of his heroes. He even made his ugly characters beautiful. We all should be able to do this within our own families.
Thanks for the put-up, though.
