The Xenophobia of Everyday Life
As we all watch the news in disbelief, seeing our country turn into Nazi Germany before our eyes and the man in the White House condoning the most vile ideology produced by the human race, my thoughts go to a much more minor and mundane incident that happened a few days ago. No one was a monster and nothing turned to tragedy. And yet, I find myself still thinking about it. I was at a fitness instructor training for an acrobatic discipline. It was rigorous and required physical and mental concentration and effort. There was to be a practical exam at the end of the training, in which we were to teach a complicated, multi-step sequence of poses and transitions to the general public while spotting them for safety. With or without justification, the students were stressed out, fearing they would forget something or mess up the sequence. Some of us were truly gifted athletes and yoginis, whose ability to demonstrate poses exceeded their ability to spontaneously come up with rich and prec...