"There's Nothing Special About Where You Came From"

When I was in my early 20s, there was a young woman visiting from out of town whom I wanted to impress. Around that time I had discovered banh mi, inexpensive and good-tasting sandwiches from a shop nearby. So I took her there, and she bought herself a sandwich.

This was in the neighborhood near where I grew up. I always thought that Vietnamese culture was interesting because when I was a kid, I saw the extra marks on their letters and heard them talking to their parents on the sidewalk after school in a different language. (Banh mi is Vietnamese.)

Vietnamese culture was special because it was part of my neighborhood, and different from me. It was part of where I came from.

For some reason, I had never noticed, or there never was, a banh mi restaurant in my neighborhood until that time in my life in my early 20s. So it was special as well -- I didn't even realize that there could be more than one banh mi restaurant. This banh mi restaurant was in a class of its own.

I don't know what the young woman thought of banh mi. She was better-traveled than me and could easily have had it somewhere else. (Because, in reality, banh mi is a genre of food.) She may not have cared, or had the tact to not care, about the commonness of the banh mi.

I used to think Ethiopian music was special, but someone (a different person than the young woman above) pointed out that it was just partway between West African and Arab music. Nothing special. Imagining that attitude grafted onto the young woman makes me think, "there's nothing special about where you come from". In reality, many major cities in the US have Vietnamese (and Cambodian, Somali, Ethiopian, etc.) populations. If there is a significant population of these cultures, they will have restaurants. San Diego probably does not have the best Vietnamese restaurants. Someone told me that San Jose has a bigger Vietnamese scene. Vietnamese culture is in some ways clearly classier and more real than a typical franchise restaurant, but similarly it's found in multiple cities. Imagine if someone grew up next to a McDonald's and thought it was something special.

I feel a little bit embarrassed to have been so enamored of the banh mi shop. We fall in love with the existing things that happen to be nearby, I guess, but then grow up and see that they are typical, and on a continuum. We only thought they were so special because we didn't know any better. Now that I am older, I think I was a bit of a fool for being so taken with the banh mi shop. But who is the greater fool, the person who in ignorance loves particular things as though they are the best in the world, or the person who in knowledge never loves that deeply?

What else is only special because it's where we come from? The specific moral values we hold? Morality itself? Consciousness? Existence? If I want, I can conceive of each of these things ending without feeling any qualms. So in that moment of calm, am I more cosmopolitan, more broadminded, more objective, and thus more in tune with reality, than the people who fight for existence, consciousness, morality, or particular moral values? Maybe I have a "God's eye view of the world". (But that may be the wrong term -- why should God have a particularly detached view of things?)

So maybe we are two sets of fools, the people who want to hold onto the special feelings of youth despite evidence, and the people who see beyond all special feelings to the point where deep and wholehearted love is impossible, or even to the point that nothing matters. Is there any way to be wise in the way each are wise, and not fools in the ways each are fools? Otherwise we fight each other and will never convince each other, because each side will have an irreplaceable value that the other does not honor, whether it is really loving or it is seeing things as they are.