Reading Time: 3 Minutes
Last night, midway through family movie night, we raided the snack cupboard and I offered my daughter cookies or chips. She didn’t want either, so then I offered her some mixed nuts.
“Ew, gross,” she said, rolling her eyes so hard I think I saw one briefly pop out of her left ear.
Her reaction brought me right back to my own childhood when I also hated mixed nuts.
My grandparents would often have bowls of mixed nuts around when the family would gather and I can remember the first time I grabbed a handful and tried them. They WERE gross!
I knew I liked peanuts, but mixed nuts were not my thing, so much so that it became a small part of my identity.
Hi, I’m Lee, I like peanuts but not mixed nuts.
Because when you’re a kid, who you are and how you connect with people all boils down to what you like and what you don’t like.
You like giraffes? Me too! We are friends now.
And what you don’t like can bond you even more with other people.
Wait, Adrian, you hate brussels sprouts, too? Now we are BEST friends.
Life was simple.
Or, rather, the things you liked and didn’t like were simple. I’d love to have an adult conversation about what your favourite animal is, but we have other things to talk about.
Back to the nuts.
That first handful of mixed nuts, I just thought that’s what nuts were and so it became a part of me. I like peanuts but I don’t like nuts.
If a grownup responded with “Well, a peanut is a nut,” I’d clap back that I don’t like nutS, with an emphasis on the “s”. I thought that was pretty clever, and it kind of is, but neither I nor the grownups in question were smart enough to even know that peanuts are legumes, but I digress.
Then one day at my grandparents’ house something happened: I’m maybe 7 years old and I was struck by something that I’d now refer to as “intellectual curiosity”.
I realized, hey, mixed nuts are just a bunch of individual nuts, and I know I like the peanuts on their own, and grandad keeps yelling at me for stealing only the peanuts, so maybe I’d like some of the other nuts on their own as well.
And so I started trying them one by one. I didn’t know what each of them were called at the time, but I ended up really liking cashews and almonds. Pecans weren’t my thing and the brazil nuts I could take or leave. The results aren’t what matters. Looking back, what matters is that I was willing to try them out. To learn what other nuts I liked and didn’t like so that I could also have the peanuts and not get yelled at for only taking them from the dish.
And the funniest thing happened as I got older, I stopped picking out the brazil nuts and, eventually, the pecans. I found that a handful of mixed nuts was just as good all together without needing to put in the effort to separate them. How much I enjoyed the peanuts, cashews and almonds was greater than the dislike I had for pecans, and the whole process had gotten easier AND I was no longer getting yelled at for picking through the whole bowl!
My identity had changed.
Hi, my name is Lee. I like mixed nuts (and I cannot lie).
Now, I get it, not everyone is going to like all the nuts in the bowl, but if you’re wanting to be a gracious host for a group of people who like nuts, providing mixed nuts gives you the greatest chance of making the most amount of people happy, and isn’t that something we should all strive for, seeking out what we can do to provide happiness for others?
So, hard left turn here: America.
You have the chance now to do something extraordinary.
You have the chance to shed the idea of looking at life through the simplistic terms of a child, of what you simply like or don’t like.
You have the opportunity to embrace what makes you YOU, embrace your diversity, embrace the progress that you’ve made to include everyone in your society. BUILD on that progress. You each don’t have to love every single thing that makes you American and that’s okay, because ANOTHER AMERICAN will love the piece you don’t.
I’m no longer going to call those who are stoking all this hatred stupid, because that in itself is a simplistic term; they simply lack, currently, the intellectual curiosity needed to develop tolerance.
A little intellectual curiosity can go a long way, and it’s not too late for any of you to start.
And here’s the best part… America, if you can go down this road and embrace who you are as a whole, you can AT THE SAME TIME earn some global goodwill and lean into how the world is currently viewing you…
I mean this with love: America, you’re nuts.