A few days ago I heard someone say, "The world is divided into two kinds of people. Those who believe that the world is divided into two kinds of people and those who don't." I suspect that most people believe that the world is divided into two kinds of people: us and them. For me, growing up, the us was poor people and the them was rich people.
The "rich" people were represented in my world by my teachers who wore fancy clothes and drove new cars and lived on the other side of town. Then there were the people who came at me via the television, the Brady kids who came home to sandwiches made by Alice, the good-natured housekeeper.
I was mostly surrounded by poor people: people who didn't own homes or much of anything else, people who led hardscrabble lives. I knew that some people looked down on us, but I came to see us as superior in many ways: stronger, more generous, easy going and quick to laugh. I used to love to ride the Sunday school bus to the baptist church across town and hear the charismatic preacher rail against the rich: the image of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle so vivid in my mind.
I carried this us and them mentality into adulthood. I still feel an affinity with poor people. I am suspicious of all others. Dividing up the world in this way is costly. It denies a fundamental truth. There is really only one kind of people: us.
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