Unlikely Friendships
I heard the story about how a prosecutor and a gangster became friends. When they met, the prosecutor, a successful woman with an indomitable spirit and a lot of grit, was determined to put the man who had become a felon in his youth, used drugs, killed a man and had little respect for the law, behind bars. Circumstances, determined by a Judge, to have the man participate in a pre-trial program precipitated an unlikely friendship.
It didn’t begin as friendship. Both the prosecutor and gangster brought their own viewpoints to the scheduled meetings, keeping a measured physical distance between each other. One day, however, the prosecutor made the decision to shorten their physical distance and joined him on the bench he was sitting. This one act of kindness grew into a mutual respect and acceptance over a period of months.
She began seeing him as a young man who had a life of “hard knocks” that were not entirely all his own doing, even though the choices he made, he had to “own.” She gained a perspective of the law that included justice, but with kindness and not just a desire to put all rebellious young men, behind bars.
The young man still had to pay for his crimes, but his manner and attitude toward his ‘situation’ changed. The prosecutor believed the young man could make the change required to start a new life, and he accepted the challenge.
Our lives are all defined by our choices. We each have ‘hard knocks’ that can catapult us into situations that left unchecked, can make our lives much different than what we had imagined. But when someone believes in us, it helps put things in the proper perspective and can help us get back on track.
This same thing is true of our children. As parents we watch (and cringe) while attempting to raise our children right. It seems no matter how hard we try, our offspring want to take a different path than we’d like. That’s not a bad thing in itself. Our children need to be true to themselves, until it becomes a problem of legality or life and death. We don’t want them to make choices that will put them in prison, even for a day!
As adults, however, we make, even if inadvertently, judgement calls on people we don’t know well. We judge on their looks, attitude, behaviors, history (if we know it), what others think or what we think they think, geography, our own history and attitudes and more. The point is, sometimes our perceptions are skewed by what we don’t know!
Our own biases and fears can give our children the wrong impression or feelings. Have you ever been shopping or otherwise in public and witnessed a child’s preoccupation with a person in a wheelchair, Down Syndrome, or other visible disability? Our initial reaction is to scold for staring, and quickly find the quickest way around them. What we are teaching our children is to avoid that which we don’t understand or even perhaps to avoid that which we find ‘less’ than what we perceive as a ‘regular and/or perfect’ human being.
If we are deliberately careful with making pre-conceived judgements, —-and teach our children to be this way, as well, we (and our children) may discover a friend rather than an adversary. Perhaps like the prosecutor and gangster, we will be able to create ‘unlikely friendships!”
Photo Credit: https://www.pexels.com/search/wheelchair/