Perspective

I gazed out the window of my hotel room on the 40th floor of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. I was in New York City for a brief 48 hours with my best friend. Just minutes before, we had walked into the hotel, escaping the heat, as well as the noise and bustling activity of the city. Forty floors up in our air-conditioned room, I couldn’t hear the noise and could barely make out the people and vehicles below, which only appeared to be specs.

The image reminded me of a story my colleague, Cheryl Wittke told me. Several years ago, Cheryl’s daughter was working on a school assignment. I don’t remember the details of the assignment, but it involved her looking out over the city of Chicago from the top floor of one its prominent sky rise buildings. In the paper she wrote about the experience, she noted that from that vantage point you are so removed from the street level that it’s impossible to see or understand what is happening on the street.

While we were in NYC, Carolyn and I saw the matinee show of Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Our seats were in the middle of the last row of the balcony. We could see the entire stage, but missed the nuance in facial expressions of the actors. Watching the Broadway version of Harper Lee’s depiction of a trial in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s was sadly eerily familiar. While the performances were amazing, Carolyn and I found it difficult to listen to some of the dialogue. Based on the language we’re hearing in July 2019, it makes me wonder if we are really removed from the Jim Crow laws that plagued our country following the Civil War?

Later in the evening, we watched the musical, Frozen. For that performance, we sat on the first row of the theater and looked up at the performers. We were so close that when Caissie Levy (Elsa) rushed to stage left during a scene, her skirt whipped across Carolyn’s face. We were close enough to see the perspiration glistening on the performers’ faces, but probably missed the nuance of the broader view from the balcony.

That’s the thing about viewpoints. It’s hard to understand different perspectives if you’re only looking at things from one view.

A few weeks ago, I met with members of the Community Development staff at Parkland Hospital to discuss ideas to decrease the rate of late stage breast cancer diagnosis among women in a couple of zip codes in south Dallas. Many of us on the leadership team had been discussing ways to expand access to Parkland’s mobile mammography van in the two zip codes, rationalizing that expanding access would solve the issue. When you work for a hospital system, the default solution is usually improving access to care. However, I learned from the Community Development staff that work every day with the population we are trying to reach, that we were missing the bigger picture. Many of the women we are trying to reach are single mothers who are working multiple jobs trying to feed their families, keep their utilities turned on, and pay rent. Couple that with the internal barriers such as needing several appointments to complete paperwork for financial assistance, it’s no wonder that getting an annual mammogram is a low priority for these women.

It’s a noble cause to serve those who have limited financial resources, but the Community Development staff certainly opened my eyes to the need for involving the voices of those we are serving, as well as the staff on the front lines.

This seems to be a recurrent theme with my blog posts, but it is worth repeating. We need many and varied perspectives to solve the complex societal problems we are facing. As Carolyn and I looked out the window of our 40th floor hotel down at the specs below us, she reminded me those were not just “specs.” They are real people, each with a story.

There are two lines from To Kill a Mockingbird that are still reverberating through my mind. The words that Atticus Finch (Jeff Daniels) delivered during his closing argument in defense of Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), “We have to heal this wound, or we will never stop bleeding.” And, the question asked by Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), “How long are we going to have to wait?”

Watching To Kill a Mockingbird left me hoping that all of us will experience an awakening to the realities of injustice and bigotry. Watching Frozen left me cheering for the “sister/girl power” theme, and hoping that we can somehow find a way to “let go” of the things that keep us from doing that – hatred, fear, mistrust.

And as always, the weekend with Carolyn left me feeling grateful for time spent with my best friend.