Pluralist Americans: Phyllis in Oklahoma
How can
philosophical
pluralism, as I described it before, guide reasonable and sensible
experience in America? Let me try to answer concretely, turning to examples of
people who have personified this pluralism for me, before trying to answer more
abstractly. I will try to write a few personal profiles here and see what
emerges from them.
I went to college in Arkansas on a scholarship for Central American students. I lived on a residence hall on campus. I had no family in the United States, so when the dorms closed during breaks, I had to find a place to go. During spring break, one strategy was to go on (religious) missionary trips. That’s how one time I ended up going to Oklahoma to stay with a host family at a farm while participating in a missionary campaign.
And that’s how I met Phyllis. She was wife, mother, and homemaker at the farm. She took my friend Luis and I into her family’s home and treated us like her sons for a week. Over breakfasts and dinners and walks she told us her life story.
Phyllis grew up in Oklahoma, married young, had children, and lived her whole adult life at the farm with her husband and kids. She had never even left the state of Oklahoma, not even to Arkansas, less than one-hundred miles away. And yet she wanted to know everything about Luis and me, about our upbringing, about Costa Rica, about Spanish. And her dream was one day to travel to Rio de Janeiro for Carnaval. For an evangelical Christian homemaker, that was quite the wild dream. She had a healthy fire burning in her bones and wanderlust pumping from her heart and streaming through her veins. I write more about her and her family in chapter 3 of my book, Loving Immigrants in America.
My point here is that difference interested Phyllis. It attracted her caring attention, perhaps even seduced her. She loved and embraced, rather than rejected, what was culturally and socially different from her. It led her to care for two college boys so seemingly unlike her. Her white, Evangelical Christian, English-speaking, conservative background was a springboard from which to search for diversity through imagination and wanderlust and to seek connections when two wayward Costa Ricans crossed paths with her at her farm. It was a starting point from which to explore, not a bastion to be defended from encroaching difference – from, say, Spanish-speaking Central Americans. Phyllis, in short, had a pluralist philosophical attitude.
I went to college in Arkansas on a scholarship for Central American students. I lived on a residence hall on campus. I had no family in the United States, so when the dorms closed during breaks, I had to find a place to go. During spring break, one strategy was to go on (religious) missionary trips. That’s how one time I ended up going to Oklahoma to stay with a host family at a farm while participating in a missionary campaign.
And that’s how I met Phyllis. She was wife, mother, and homemaker at the farm. She took my friend Luis and I into her family’s home and treated us like her sons for a week. Over breakfasts and dinners and walks she told us her life story.
Phyllis grew up in Oklahoma, married young, had children, and lived her whole adult life at the farm with her husband and kids. She had never even left the state of Oklahoma, not even to Arkansas, less than one-hundred miles away. And yet she wanted to know everything about Luis and me, about our upbringing, about Costa Rica, about Spanish. And her dream was one day to travel to Rio de Janeiro for Carnaval. For an evangelical Christian homemaker, that was quite the wild dream. She had a healthy fire burning in her bones and wanderlust pumping from her heart and streaming through her veins. I write more about her and her family in chapter 3 of my book, Loving Immigrants in America.
My point here is that difference interested Phyllis. It attracted her caring attention, perhaps even seduced her. She loved and embraced, rather than rejected, what was culturally and socially different from her. It led her to care for two college boys so seemingly unlike her. Her white, Evangelical Christian, English-speaking, conservative background was a springboard from which to search for diversity through imagination and wanderlust and to seek connections when two wayward Costa Ricans crossed paths with her at her farm. It was a starting point from which to explore, not a bastion to be defended from encroaching difference – from, say, Spanish-speaking Central Americans. Phyllis, in short, had a pluralist philosophical attitude.
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