LOVING OUR ENEMIES
2025-10-22
Therefore, I want to be part of the 93% that either haven’t figured out yet what we want or are looking for cues from more positive perspectives. For sure, it also takes self-monitoring of my own daily habits and the educational choices I make to learn.
It’s taken almost 80 years for me to label my Dad as one of my mentors because he was not appreciated in my family and community as I was growing up. Dad loved America and became a Christian. He was known for not smoking and not working on Sundays to get ahead like other Japanese farmers in our Japanese in America community.
Dad was born in Orting, Washington in 1908. His parents were wealthy Hiroshima, Japan, land owners. His parents were here in Washington to earn money and went back to Japan in 1936. Grandpa left Dad penniless in hopes that he would join them in Japan and monitor the inheritance.
Dad's examples of promoting harmony and friendships in our world of name calling and divisive rhetoric!
This morning, October 2025, my enemies are the those who support and perpetuate the dark aspects of our social media. In the 1937-1940s in Eastern Oregon & Western Idaho, my Dad arranged to have coffee with anyone who called him “a Jap”!
Our family started over, from Western Washington state, with farming inland. The Owyhee Dam near the Snake River that divides Eastern Oregon and Southwestern Idaho, provided irrigation in that area for row crop farming, skills which the Japanese immigrants had from their heritage.
My Dad bought a 30 acre plot of land in Sand Hollow, Idaho, in 1943. He built our one-room house/equipment shed and also helped build a one-room church close to our farm on Highway 30. One Sunday, Mr Nelson called Dad a “Jap”, and the incident ended in clenched fists, with a circle of parishioners outside the front steps, but Dad was carrying my baby sister the whole time. Later that year my mom almost died of internal bleeding and the Nelson daughters were our babysitters.
Harvard professor, Dr. Arthur Brooks, may appear “Pollyanna-ish”, but his work comes with science: “Humans are programmed with an Insular Cortex in our brain that brings on `Disgust’ of pathogens in moldy an dirty places with emotions. This same emotional pathway is being used by 7% of our population, who have the buy-in and energy to use public media to promote contempt!” Most of us learned from early childhood to “take the high road”, but Dark Triad stories and incidents get more hits?
Therefore, I want to be part of the 93% that either haven’t figured out yet what we want or are looking for cues from more positive perspectives. For sure, it also takes self-monitoring of my own daily habits and the educational choices I make to learn.
It’s taken almost 80 years for me to label my Dad as one of my mentors because he was not appreciated in my family and community as I was growing up. Dad loved America and became a Christian. He was known for not smoking and not working on Sundays to get ahead like other Japanese farmers in our Japanese in America community.
Dad was born in Orting, Washington in 1908. His parents were wealthy Hiroshima, Japan, land owners. His parents were here in Washington to earn money and went back to Japan in 1936. Grandpa left Dad penniless in hopes that he would join them in Japan and monitor the inheritance.
We are currently experiencing a political climate of labeling those who vote differently as enemies. Taking my cues from Dad, I work to have coffee and appreciate our differences.
Stanford University neuroscientist and tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, Andrew Huberman, suggests we can also add gratitude practice for a more fufilling attitude in life. It's important to write it down.
I was given a gift of true gratitude with our last conversation before Dad died in 1991. He said, “The happiest day of my life was the day you were born!”