My father’s parents both “came over on the boat” from Italy. My grandmother was only ten, and my grandfather was seventeen. She came with her parents. He came alone. Their marriage was arranged by her widowed father when my grandmother was fifteen because her father wanted to return to Italy, and she did not.
Especially in those days, Italian Catholics were expected to marry other Italian Catholics. My grandparents had five children, four boys and one girl. The girl broke with full tradition and married an Irish Catholic, much to my grandmother’s displeasure and dismay. My aunt paved the way, however, for my father who broke both traditions and married a non-Italian, non-Catholic, who agreed to convert to Catholicism. It is not that my grandmother was prejudiced against my mother, but it took a while for her to accept that my mother was good enough for her son. It is a family joke that it took thirty years or more for her to accept “the Irishman” into the family. He knew he was in when Grandma put a five-dollar bill in his birthday card.
By the time my generation came along, it was not necessarily expected that we marry an Italian, but the question still came up. I was at a family gathering at my grandmother’s house when Cousin Elfie stopped me and asked if my fiancé was Italian. I told her that he was not—that he was Hungarian. She patted my hand and said, “They’re good people too.”
I think of this often when I hear all of the hate that is spouted on the news these days. We are not all going to agree on politics, religion, world issues, etc., etc., etc., but please, let’s remember that there is some good in everyone. We need to remind ourselves that even people who have done terribly bad things in their pasts are still capable of doing good things in their futures. Every day we have the ability to help another person, even if is something as small as opening a door or smiling while saying hello. We can practice patience while driving. We can welcome new people to our families, our work places, or our neighborhoods and make them feel at home. We do not have to understand why people are the way they are or believe what they do in order to show them kindness. So, the next time we see hate, let’s show love. And when we do not understand another’s point of view, let’s remind ourselves that they are most likely “good people too.”