Attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI can erase the past if we do not guard memories of our youth.
For instance, my best South Baltimore friend at Oliver H Perry P.S. #92 elementary school was Asian, the son of a deceased U.S. Army veteran who taught me how to play chess and whose fearful sadness when President Kennedy was assassinated matched mine.
My best friend at Francis Scott Key P.S. #76 middle school came from an Italian immigrant family. He resembled a young Mick Jagger and introduced me to Rock 'n Roll music.
At Baltimore Polytechnic Institute , my high school Jewish best friend always encouraged me in puberty when I could not seem to get out of my own way of self-inflicted embarrassment.
At University of Baltimore, my undergraduate best friend was an African American who once held the audience -- including Dantini the Magnificent -- at Peabody Book Stube spellbound with his impromtu piano performance of a Chopin necturne. He and I worked together on the university's Student Press, imagining ourselves to be clones of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (with an Afro haircut).
My graduate school best friend at the same university was gay. He and his boyfriend double-dated with my girlfriend at the time and me at the Hippo. He died of AIDS a month after we completed our final class project.
I am blessed to have had a DEI education filled with friends with whom to share life's wonder, pain and glory.
I would not have wanted it any other way.
