Book excerpt
Understanding the Difficulties of Coexistence
I started writing my book, “The Human Species Needs a Mission: Survival and Discovery” two years ago. The world has changed so profoundly that sections are now irrelevant. I decided to take my niece, Maxin Leano’s advice and publish it in a series of essays. Here is the first one:
In 1935, at the ripe old age of 9, my older friends and I had a stickball team, the Ward Ave. Window-Breakers. When we were not hitting to each other in practice, we had periodic snowball fights with the “foreign” kids who lived over a hill on Manor Avenue. They were about our age, and once we got to know them, we learned that they were also Jewish and lived in homes almost identical to ours. On our block, across the street from the hill, we built snow forts and armed ourselves with snowballs. The Manor Avenue Boys would charge down the hill with their snowballs, and we would bombard them with ours. Most of the time, you could not tell who won or lost. One day, however, our marksmanship overwhelmed our “enemies,” and they ran back to their street, soaking wet and humbled in defeat. We didn’t have much time to celebrate our military victory when we looked up the hill and saw their big brothers running toward us with vengeance in their eyes. They picked us up, turned us upside down, and dropped us headfirst into our snow forts. With time, our battles morphed into stickball games. When we visited the Manor Avenue Boys on their turf, we were astonished. They played all the games we played, and we didn’t know how they had learned them. How could they possibly have learned the games that we had invented? Slowly, it dawned on us that we didn’t invent those games: stoop, curve and slug ball (boune the ground first handball), pitcher-batter-catcher, ringolevio, Johnny-on-the-pony, kick the can, and many others. We finally understood that these were games that many other kids knew and loved as much as we did. Ringolevio was our favorite, featuring touch, capture and rescue, running and evasion.
Years later, I saw a painting by Pieter Bruegel, dated 1560, called “Children Playing.” He could have painted it on Ward Avenue in the 1930s. It illustrated some of the same games we played. Who knew? In writing this story I gained a new insight. What the Ward Avenue Window-Breakers experienced before visiting the Manor Avenue Boys was an observation that anthropologists believe is close to universal: Tribes that are isolated from other tribes develop myths idolizing their own abilities, considering themselves unique or exceptional while believing other tribes are inferior. We actually thought we invented those games, and when we met the Manor Avenue Boys, we thought we were better than they were. That feeling lasted until their big brothers turned us headfirst into the world of reality.