Growing Up Normal

 I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, at a time when it was somewhat revolutionary. In a period when segregation, legal and illegal, was the norm, Shaker had chosen to address the new influx of African-Americans by actively working to increase integration and maintain racial balances across the city. It was famously affluent at the time (there was even an article in Cosmopolitan labelling Shaker "utopian" and "the wealthiest suburb in the United States"). Shaker was thoroughly integrated, heavily Jewish and, well, rich.

What you grow up with is "normal." That's what "normal" means to most people. I thought Shaker Heights was the cultural template across America. Then I went to Lexington, Kentucky for my undergraduate college: Transylvania University (yes, really). Talk about culture shock!


It's one of the oldest colleges in America, founded, four years after the revolution, on a land grant from Daniel Boone.  The Daniel Boone.  Henry Clay taught there. It was white, southern and Protestant. Jews didn't even comprise 1% of the student body.  Same for Blacks.  I'd never felt like a minority before, and now I was one with a vengeance!  And southerners had a very different "normal."  It was "normal" to be Christian.  It was "normal" to think of Martin Luther King as an overrated "rabble rouser."  It was even "normal" to think the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery!

In retrospect, this was one of the best experiences of my life, because it taught me that there's no one "normal."  There are only mistaken assumptions about it.

How about you?  When did your normal smash headlong into other people's?

Alexthekay, still growing up at 70


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