Let me first say, I love country music. It is probably the genre I listen to most (although I prefer the variants of bluegrass in country,) and I'm not sure anything beats live Texas Country.
That being said, I hear some of the most ridiculous things in country music. This morning was no exception. I heard a song I've heard many times before that I've always been bothered by. The premise of the song is a man listing things he does. If you don't like it, then you just don't understand. The implication here is that I am somehow uninformed or unintelligent because I don't like that he says Merry Christmas and not Happy Holidays. I just rolled my eyes a little as I typed that, but that was not what jumped out to me this morning.
All I could think was, "of course there are things I don't understand. Duh." I started to wonder if maybe starting at "well, YOU just don't understand;" was not the best plan. Maybe we should start at, "well, I just don't understand." There's a huge difference there. We all know that we don't know everything, we all know there are ideas that we don't quite grasp. This doesn't make us stupid, it is just part of the human condition. I will never understand growing up in the level of poverty as a child in the poorest reaches of Africa. My friend raised as an agnostic will never understand the fear of church politics as well as someone raised a preacher's kid. I will never understand what it means to be a man in ministry and no man will ever understand what it means to be a woman in the ministry. This list could get really long, really fast.
The point is not to beat ourselves up, the point is to stop starting on the defensive with everything. If we could all just acknowledge that we don't know everything, then maybe we could start learning from each other instead of fighting about how we are different.
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