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Good Morning Thinkers!
Archive: October 16, 2000

Three-Bean Salad

As we move steadily closer to another seemingly irreconcilable conflict in the middle east, I am reminded of a story my friend Dolores Forsythe tells.

Several years ago she was working in New York on the 57th floor of the headquarters building of a Fortune 500 company. One day she was sitting in a meeting with two senior managers at a long mahogany table and the managers were quarreling bitterly. The confrontation was basically about an idea that one of them had claimed as his own when the other person thought he should get the credit. As she sat listening to them waste time and energy fighting over who should get the credit, she thought, "I need to get back to Texas where people are real."

Shortly after that high-level conflict, she flew back to Goatneck, Texas, (that's really a place) to visit her family. Goatneck is smack dab in the midst of the Bible belt and all of Dolores' family are active church goers. As she sat having coffee with her aunt Gladys, Dolores noticed that her aunt Bernice had not stopped in yet. It was very unusual for Aunt Bernice not to show up when Dolores visited so she asked why.

Aunt Gladys said, "Last Sunday at the church social, Bernice brought a three-bean salad and when someone said how good it was, she said it was her recipe. She knows it was my recipe so now I'm not speaking to her."

Dolores says, "Suddenly I realized that people are the same everywhere, whether they're in a New York City skyscraper or on a Goatneck, Texas, farm. Conflicts and disputes happen. The problem is how to reconcile our differences. Not long after that recipe incident my Aunt Bernice died. Those two sisters never spoke to each other again -- over a three-bean salad recipe."

A recipe for three-bean salad ...
The credit for a great new idea ...
Or a treasured piece of hallowed ground ...

Are these things really worth fighting for?
Worth splitting a family for?
Worth killing and going to war for?

Will we ever learn that ideas are only worthwhile when they are shared?

Will we ever understand that the earth cannot be owned regardless of how we draw lines on a piece of paper?

Will we ever find a way to resolve our conflicts without violence and bloodshed?

--Joyce Wycoff