Melting Pot
October 15, 2001
7:41 a.m.
As fate would have it, this past weekend was the traditional Ethnic Expo in Columbus, Indiana. This is a celebration where people of many heritages come together and celebrate. It is a celebrationthat consists of food from probably forty or fifty places around the globe, and musical acts, and dancers from Africa and India and all over. It is one of Lisa and my favorite community activities. I didn't know what to expect this time, though. Columbus is an interesting town. I don't really know what our demographics are, but they seem to be like this: mostly white (hey, it's the mid-West, you know?), less than usual African American, more than average Asian and Hispanic. More than average East Indian and Middle Eastern. It is the last that made me pensive about the event. No, I wasn't worried about terrorists. Geeze. This is Columbus, you know? But I wondered about how the community would deal with things. It turns out I shouldn't have wondered. The weather on Friday night was perfect. Ethnic Expo is set up n booths along the open street that has been shut down. The place smelled of sausage and barbque and pork and teriaki. We had food from Vietnam and China and Italy and Israel and Japan. Brigid had a funnel cake -- is that American? We had desert. People walked through the street in a big mass. It was two schools of salmon coming through a stream from different directions. A booth had African drums playing, their skinny booms echoed over the night for awhile. We listened to a band play something that sounded Indian. I talked to a woman from Taiwan who I used to work with. A schoolmate of Brigid's was working in a booth from China, and another in Russia's. There was a mural up on a big wall. It was a painting of an American flag waving in the air, with the city's name penned neatly to one side. A stage had been set up underneath it to let you get up close to it. Blue and red pens were scattered on the stage. I watched for a minute and saw that people were going up to it one-by-one, and grabbing a pen to write with. They penned their name, and sometimes a slogan. Hundreds of names. Hundreds of notes. Dear New York: We're so sorry this happened. Shrivi and Kiran. We added our own names. I tagged "USA" by mine. Brigid added "Be Strong" by hers. By the end of the night there were thousands of names. I recognized some of them. They were my friends and my neighbors. But most of them I didn't recognize. Some people drew pictures. Some people wrote in their home language. One wrote in what I assume was Chinese, then translated God Bless Americans. Some wrote their units, and notes to the soldiers or the fire fighters. The mural is being sent to New York, I understand. That's good. Looking at it was good for me. Watching people work on it, run their hands over the painted paper and mark their names. Watching people see what other had wrote. It was important. The mural was something that could only be made by a community. By the end of the night it stood in the spotlight like the worlds most incredible graffiti. Now I'm not saying that a night in Columbus has changed the world. I'm not even saying that Columbus is the greatest ethnic melting pot in the world, because it isn't. Columbus, Indiana is a dinky little place in the middle of nowhere with a heavily white population and a Bible Belt mentality and all the good and bad that this entails. I can only say that the banner made me proud to be there. I can only say that it made some thing better. When it was approaching 8:00, we went to the stage. The celtic band Gaelic Storm was playing. We were a little late getting there, and we edged into the standing room only crowd. To our surprise, we ran into friends of ours from Brigid's old school. They are British citizens. The father is travelling back home in a week or so for vacation. We talked for a little, then the music started. After a song or two, an old man and woman from India stepped close to our left. I looked to the right and saw a woman who I know to a native of Pakistan standing five or ten feet away. The music played. The singer was from Ireland. The fiddler was from Chicago. And so we stood there in the early hours of a Columbus night, people from Pakistan, and India, and England, and Taiwan, and the United States, and China, and a bunch of other places, and we listened to music. And it was good.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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