The Caregiver’s Tales: A Blog

Inclusion. This is a hard one, because on a personal level it’s likely we spend most of our lives excluding people and things from our lives. And while it's logical to argue that diversity is good and exposure to different foods, and music, and art will enrich our lives, most of us find ourselves settling in with the familiar religion, music, people and food that we like. And that feels pretty normal. There are even laws to protect our ability to choose, and laws to protect us from people who want to get too close to us.

I like the word equity. I have some in my home, and I try to have it in my life. It’s about fairness, but like its brother, diversity, it has gotten a bad rap in some quarters recently. What I don’t understand is why? Equity is baked into almost everything we do in our lives, especially sports. We handicap golfers and bowlers to even the playing field. We divide fighters into weight classes so that fighters are evenly matched. Horses and race cars are managed. Our public schools are divided into classes based on size. It’s about equity.

I was re-watching the Good Shepherd the other day, a 2006 film by Robert De Niro. It’s a fictional work about the creation of American Intelligence services. There’s an early scene where De Niro’s character is recruiting Matt Damon’s character to join the new endeavor prior to the US entering World War II. They’re at a Skull and Bones retreat, which is a secret society at Yale. In a quiet room over cigars and brandy, De Niro explains, “I’ll be looking for a few good men to head up various departments, in other words no Jews, or Negroes, or very few Catholics…”

Spent a great deal of time outside yesterday, and I believe I’m paying the coughing price this morning. The winds were up and so was the dust but I drove the ball well and we couldn’t quit our first round of golf this year for a little wind and dust. So, we plodded on and now my nose is stuffy and I’ve got a bit of a cough, plus I’m sore again, but I’ve decided that is simply the price of living past my best-used-by date, the other is attributed to the dust.