"Coexist -- It's in our DNA" by Grandmother Windsong

            The cornerstone of my Judeo-Christian upbringing proclaims the inscription “Love Thy Neighbor.”  I learned as a child that my “neighbor” might be living across town, on the East Coast, in the Soviet Union, in a tent in the Middle East, in a jungle in Africa, or in an adobe “casa” in Mexico.  My church was big on missionaries.   

        We sang out loud and strong in Sunday School that  “Jesus loves . . .  all the children of the world.”  I believed it and tried to live it;  however, I must admit that I received a bit of satisfaction when the teacher caught the mean girl in second grade cheating and she had to stay at her desk during recess.  

            In 1964, my nine-year-old heart nearly broke in two when I discovered a lot of people rejected that cornerstone and forgot or ignored the words to my Sunday school song.  I watched news reports of African-American teens smashed against buildings by powerful sprays from fire hoses and beaten with sticks. Blood trickled down their foreheads. Vicious dogs lunged at them.  Months later, a dynamite blast killed four Black girls in the safest place in the world--a church basement.  A month later Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated my president, John F. Kennedy. We were told the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and they were pointing them at us!  

        Heavy stuff for a little kid.

        I couldn’t understand why we didn't get along.  In my child-like mind, it seemed rather easy to love our neighbors.  Why didn’t grownups feel this connection to coexist peacefully--to love one another? 

         Now that I'm a grandmother with an insatiable curiosity and a delicious amount of time, I read a little science and dabble in genealogy.  I took a DNA test, which helped me discover that the desire to coexist with others is embedded deep within us, so deep that it is in our DNA. 

            Like most people, especially Americans, I have a mixed heritage. My British, Irish, and German DNA coexist with a small percentage of DNA found among people in the Middle East and India. Recently, I learned that my ancestral Gaelic tongue shares common words with Sanskrit in India, indicating people migrated a long way over time. 

 My Eastern Europe, possibly Polish, genes coincide with the discovery that my ancestral patronymic name is Jewish and that my Polish/Jewish forebears probably converted to Protestantism over two hundred years ago--either at the point of a sword or because they bonded with people hauling around the cornerstone of love.  I don't think my grandparents, with a Jewish surname, would have survived if they had lived in Poland when the Nazis during World War II.   

       

The point is this:  different "people" of my body's genetic soup get along fine.  

 

        The science video Your Inner Fish gave me more to think about. When I was an embryo in my mother's womb, waiting to evolve into my final human shape, I looked exactly like billions of other human embryos.  Even more amazing our human embryos have a basic vertebrate body similar to fish, dogs, birds, and all creatures with spines.  To the unscientific eye, the photos of a fish embryo appear nearly identical to a human embryo.  As our fish-like embryo morphs into human form, our gill arches become ear bones and we lose our tails.   

        And so with all of this internal and primordial coexisting with all the world's children  and millions of other creatures, I’m again asking the question I asked as a fourth grader: “Why can’t we get along with our neighbors?”

                                                           --- Grandmother Windsong

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