The tribe you are part of...

We all grew up in some sort of tribe.  National, racial, religious...heck, maybe just your neighborhood.  The thing about tribes is that they shape our belief systems. Scholastic (remember Weekly Reader?) does a poll each election year that is uncannily accurate.  Why? Because children parrot their parents political views.

Sometimes the ideas of the tribe conflict.  For example, I was raised in a very patriotic family who believed "all men are created equal" but I was also exposed to a lot of racial prejudice. That type of cognitive dissonance has to be resolved as we get older. We choose to stay with the tribe or grow beyond it.

 The thing is that we all have loyalties to the tribes that raised us.  It creates internal conflict when we find ourselves at odds with what we were initially taught. The matter is further complicated because we aren't always aware of the underlying beliefs that drive us.

The only way to even be able to see these things is to be exposed to new ideas and other perspectives.  For most of us, this happens in our twenties.  College, travel, a job or even marriage expose us to different ways of seeing.

Here is the thing I've discovered...it is often love that breaks these boundaries. We get to know people  who are different from us and connect with them human to human outside of tribal law. We learn that all the "rules" that separate people are just rules--things set by the tribe to make them feel safe and to keep them separate.

There is a higher law.  If we are willing to be open and seek it.