Afternoon Yall, Hope you are enjoying this fine weather we are having, catching a glimpse of the beauty and serenity to this time of the year. Around here this time of the year is mighty hectic...not the least part of which my husband is STILL going to school! <vbg> You would think at our age we would have long since become drop-outs (which I finally decided to be myself a few years ago), but taint so. If you work with kids in school seems like you go to school the rest of your life yourself...sigh. So he is still plugging...and by association...so am I, since I get the dubious honor of typing his papers...which I have been dutifully doing. The thing is, he is taking a course this time on multiculturalism and diversity...and it has brought home some thoughts I have been having for some time as I pursued this genealogy business. We tend to live in a rather isolated environment, not so different from Stewart Co. and many pockets of southern culture.... here, until the last twenty years or so, the folks who lived here were folks who had been here since they dropped off traveling the Wilderness Road. The names are old ones, ones you find etched in stone in places like Fort Boonesborough and Fort Harrod. They grew together so closely that everyone is related to everyone else in one way or another and many times can tell you just how, and all the time point and say this or that one is a cousin. Makes for interesting scenarios in politics, business and about anything you care to mention... when we came here over thirty years ago we were considered "furriners" and looked upon with some "suspicion" for quite a while, even though our roots were middle Tenn. and not all that far away, even though we had a version of the southern twang (though not the mountain one), and were obviously not that far removed in terms of cultural differences. Good folks here, folks that know the real meaning of "neighborly" and are there in a pinch, folks who look out for one another and are as apt to drop by with fresh tomatoes out of the garden and a fine apple pie as not...just because. But they also knew only one another and took a bit of warming up...and that is how it was when we arrived. These days I have been here so long that I knew many of them in much younger days and having a last name now that goes back to just after Revolutionary War times in this country, it is only the old ones who realize that I am indeed a "furriner". I have lived here long enough these days that I mostly can predict what will happen in the public arena and who is aligned with who and how the bloodlines of those out front connect to make it so. So it has remained only now beginning to change. Six years ago I remember only one child in our school who did not fit the typical pattern of this area born and bred, rural connections, white, pure Appalachian bloodline, etc. In a few short years the world has begun to infiltrate with more than a dozen students now from all the corners of the world, with folks from all over the U.S. moving in...yes the place is changing all right and with it is coming a little culture-shock and a whole new manner of thinking. Suddenly understanding the cultures of the world is being brought home, because the world is rather being deposited on the doorstep of an isolated area that had not changed a great deal in terms of deep thinking and integration of cultures in over 150 years.... But now, it was not always so, was it? We think this "understanding of cultures" and multicultural education a brand new thing that has become necessary to invent because of the "global neighborhood" media, days of airplanes and worldwide business has created...but now you think about it. Look at your own family trees, look at the 1850 census of Stewart Co. and those surrounding it. Sheesh, round here we not so long ago thought someone moving in from California was from the other side of the earth! We think we INVENTED "global culture" these days in education...and the fact is our ancestors LIVED it! An Irishman with full brogue living next to a Scotsman still not speaking the English language in a tiny backwoods section of middle Tenn....me and you descended from both....and it not at all unusual.... we have not INVENTED a "global society".....media, easier travel, and worldwide business has only RETURNED to us what the original colonization and westward expansion of our ancestors LIVED. We simply had a respite in our country and culture of a hundred fifty years or so of blending cultures so completely that we forgot we truly were a "melting pot" of the world and we thought we simply were "all the same" in our tiny little pockets of generations who stayed in the same place doing the same things....and the respite is over. Welcome to the same kind of world your ancestors who traveled over the oceans, traipsed the trails, went floating on flatboats down the Tenn. River ALREADY knew. A world where the man beside you may have grown up in the heaths of Great Britain and the woman down the road had never before seen snow... same kind of company your ancestors had and depended on for survival....and maybe due to the time and the hardships they knew something else...history seems to prove it out...maybe they realized the best hope for survival for all of them was to accept those differences and blend together in terms of thinking and caring for one another...which they did...so fully that we forgot (in our hearts if not in our minds when we thought about it) that is exactly what we did. And if we had not forgotten, perhaps there would be little need for education to "reinvent" multicultural courses and teach diversity and acceptance as the same. Well, as the world changes, and we "learn our lessons" might not be a bad thing to remember with our hearts. Hmmmm.... just a thought, jan Listowner: Tnstewar-L@rootsweb.com Tnstewar-D@rootsweb.com