The other day when I wrote about the dental hygienest (Is This Then Karma?) who took me for an older person, an idle one at that, my beef was not really about age or idleness. My beef was about not being seen, about being discounted, cut off, labeled, dismissed, put in a box.

I feel the same way when someone talks about teenagers, as if they are all alike. There are beautiful teen-agers who could teach adults a thing or two.

I feel the same when groups of people, whoever they are, are seen as one way.  I feel the same when one religion or another is seen only in one dimension, one race or another, and so on.

I am really dismayed at this sort of thing. I feel strongly about it. Yet who do I think I am? I too have my areas of small-mindedness. I haven’t escaped making assumptions based on generalities.

When I was teaching school in Massachusetts, we had a new teacher who came from Iowa. I had never met a person from Iowa before. From my perspective, she might as well have come from outer space. Somewhere in my mind, I must have had the idea that people from Iowa were not quite up to my standards. This was based on nothing, you understand. This new teacher and I became good friends. Of course, I never dreamed I would ever live in Iowa myself.

I have lived in Iowa a long time now, and I have found Iowa people to be the salt of the earth. They are truly solid and wonderful. This is my first-hand experience.  Of course, I know there really is no such thing as “Iowa people.” And yet, now I am one of them anyway.

Yet, I have a connotation of people from New York, for example, being sophisticated, knowing a lot, having been around the block.  People from California, of course, are in the know.  Do you know what I mean?

So when I asked this same dental hygienist who had pigeon-holed me if she had lived in Fairfield all her life, she said no. She had lived here for only five years.

Coming alert, I said: “Oh, where did you come from?”

“Davenport, Iowa, ” she said. And, before that, a small farm town in Iowa whose name I can’t remember.

If she had come from New York, or even Chicago, I would have been impressed. As it was, I was unimpressed. She had lived in Iowa all her life.

And so I, lying in that dental chair, did just what the dental hygienist had done to me. I pigeon-holed her,  discounted her,  labeled her, and put her in a box. Even though I know better, I still dismissed her. She was only from Iowa.

Who am I to talk? Nobody.