Trying To Communicate, A Little

I STILL DON'T FEEL LIKE I belong at the senior center, even though I've been going for a year now. I'm "only" sixty one, and most of the other members are far older, in their seventies, eighties, or sometimes nineties. And, as I expected, many of the members don't seem to like me very much, if at all. Maybe its the rolling stones T shirt, the one with the lips and tongue. most of these folks seem to prefer gospel, with a little hillbilly sprinkled in. My New York Yankees necklace probably doesn't help, but probably doesn't hurt either, since men wear necklaces all the time nowadays. Some of them probably realize by now that I am not a christian conservative, but rather, a left wing non christian pantheist, and I'm sure that doesn't set too well, even though tolerance for non Christians is increasing in a culture where the percentage of Christians has been declining steadily. What intrigues me is that, of the people who don't seem to like me, most of them have rarely if ever spoken to me. Their apparent dislike of me stems from something other than actually knowing much or anything about what I'm like personally. In most cases, I tried to speak to these people a time or two when I first joined, then gave up, and resigned myself to silence. The friends I have made there have convinced me that the problem isn't me, and that I am perfectly capable of fitting in and making friends, if not with everyone. To me this seems like something of a metaphor for the real world. We humans tend, it seems to me, to automatically mistrust people and groups of people we don't know, and we tend to warm up to people when we get to know them even a little bit, even when we speak only a few generic, civil words to them. It makes me wonder how often has this scenario been played out in the history of the human race. Individuals, or groups of people who don't know each other, mistrust each other, and because of this initial mistrust, never make any attempt at communication, and therefore become and remain either rivals, or coldly mistrusted and disregarded strangers. But what about the instances throughout history, and there have surely been many more of these than we will ever know, in which people started out coldly regarding each other with dislike and contempt, then, by happenstance or otherwise, engaged in a just a few moments of communication, found each other not so bad after all, communicated a bit more, and became, if not fast friends, then at least.....intelligent beings who regarded each other as something more than objects of contempt and disdain. A much better scenario, one might think, and worthy of us all, if only we would try it a bit more often......THANK YOU FOR VISITING!