Valuing difference is a big job. It takes more than a department or a sermon or a march to embed it. We live in cultures; and cultures resist difference. They are set up to draw a circle around sameness and close it with a secret handshake.

Difference is often so deeply threatening we cannot bear to listen to it. Much less embrace it. We cannot bear to imagine that we might be wrong and they might be right and, heaven forbid, at least as good in every way as we are. Or better.

The culprit here is an unavoidable sequence of childhood. When people are brought up to fear difference, especially difference of thought, they are easier to control. And society adores control.

We need to adore difference so that we can all finally, in fact, be the same in the only sense that matters: as human beings. And what magnificence that sameness is.

So how about we walk across the road and listen? And soon ask to be listened to, too. And promise never to interrupt. Only to learn. And eventually to respect?

And then, who knows?

To love?

Seeing people as people and not as the assumptions about their identities that society branded into our child brains is exhausting. No wonder we sit down after we say hello.

I am not like you. I am just like you.

How can both be true at once? They just can. They just are. Life is like that: maddeningly and mercifully paradoxical. In fact, nested inside this paradox is another one: we are the same, but difference is all there is. We are different inside our sameness. The strong and deadly pull, though, is to think we see difference in our humanity when all we are seeing is difference in our experience. When we give in to this societal pull to dehumanize, we pull away from each other, judging, condemning, ostracizing. This we can stop.