It’s Not That Easy Being Green by George Merrill

I like taking walks.

Usually I won’t notice the landscape or even the people nearby. Oh, yes, I might see neighbors, but my mind is busy with itself and I, in truth, take little if any heed of the ‘other.’ Familiarity with my environs can breed a level of inurement that causes me to miss seeing the world around me. I like my thoughts. I spend too much time with them.

My wife teases me about this. “We’re off in la-la land, today, aren’t we,” she’ll comment. This brings me – no, this jolts me – into the moment, but not with an open mind eager to embrace it. She makes the comment with feigned innocence. I take it as a rebuke and feel defensive. “So why can’t I be in la-la land?” I fuss to myself. Her comment is like a sound awaking me at night; I scramble to orient myself.

This is to say that I had an unusual experience recently as I took a walk. I was engrossed as always with my own thoughts when, for no apparent reason, I noticed how the world was alive with color – one color – the color green. It was early morning, both sides of the road were lined with stands of large trees and, as the morning sun struck their leaves, they radiated, like verdant flames, each leaf luminescent. Except for the arctic, and the desert most times, the world is a very green place.

There’s a culvert along the road. A large bullfrog lives there. As I walk by I hear him grumble as he plops himself from the bank into the water that collects by the culvert. My guess is that I’m intruding on his space. I notice that he, too, is two shades of green, quite lovely, really. It’s odd that for something so ever-present – a green world with many kinds of green critters – that I should suddenly see them as if for the first time.

During my epiphany along the road that day, I noticed the various shades of green; the strong sunlight tilting the green toward yellow and in the shades of the conifers, the trees appeared almost blue, the blue, which, along with yellow, constitutes the color green.

Kermit, the Muppet’s celebrity frog, struggled with being the color green. In his famous ballad, he didn’t like his color because it was ordinary, not “like flashy-sparkles in the water or stars in the sky.” Kermit wished to be different because he believed green was plain and ordinary. It was not dashing like gold or silver.
I was relieved that he finally came around to love the frog that he is, in all his greenery. “Green” he concluded was “cool and friendly like . . . and can be big like an ocean, or important like a mountain, or tall like a tree.” One of life’s great gifts is to have been personally and socially nurtured enough to love oneself, not like Trump, all puffed up and full of contempt for others, but possessing that reassuring feeling down deep that you’re OK and by feeling that way, you know that others are too.
African American Psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark conducted an experiment years ago with children. He would place two dolls in front of several black children. One doll was black, the other white. He asked the child to choose the doll they wanted. The child was then asked why she or he chose the one doll over the other. Of the twenty-one black children, fifteen chose the white doll. The experiment becomes even more painful.
When asked which doll was the nice one, the child identified the white one. Asked which was the bad one, the child pushed the black doll toward the interviewer. When the interviewer asked why the black doll was bad, the child replied, “It’s black.” The experiment was a disturbing demonstration of how social and cultural toxins had insinuated themselves into the self- image of African American children. The white majority, by legal and other means, had poisoned the souls of the black children so that they assumed contempt for themselves because of their color.

In America, it was never that easy being black.

Let’s demythologize some of the murky world of stereotypes. Strictly speaking, black people, whom whites refer to as people of color, is a misnomer. As I see it, whites are the people of color. The reflection of all colors of the spectrum is what we call white. Black, which reflects none of the color spectrum, is not considered a color at all. What remains the least distinctive among colors is white because it contains a smorgasbord of everything on the color spectrum. If there are such things as mongrels on the color wheel, it’s whites that qualify, not blacks. White has no one lineage. Black, on the other hand, is distinctive, a pure strain, if you will, as black does not depend on the colors of the spectrum to define it. Black in that sense is distinct, unique. Black is beautiful.

Where does this leave our friend Kermit? Being a white frog would never do it for Kermit. I’m glad he’s green all over. And in my book, he’s beautiful just as god made him . . . with the aid of Jim Henson, of course.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.