There is a country song about a trucker on the road who is “looking at the world through a windshield.”

It has made me think, over the years, that in actuality…we all see life through a windshield. The way we were brought up, what we were taught, where we were born–all of it is a “windshield” through which we see and understand the world.

I think it is this “windshield” which makes it so hard to comply with the golden rule… “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Trying to see the world through someone else’s eyes is not easy.

Just think about the war-torn areas of the world today. Your “windshield” is a lot different if you suffered through this past winter in Gaza versus living in Israel, or if you are in the trenches of Ukraine or trying to attack those trenches as a soldier for Russia. It is hard to apply the golden rule in such situations.

In thinking back to my own childhood, my view of life was pretty much shaped by the experiences of growing up on a dairy farm in Chautauqua County. The “city kids” that I knew and palled around with lived in the City of Jamestown. That was what “city” meant to me. It wasn’t until I got to Chicago, after college, that I really found out what urban living was all about.

Probably the biggest eye-opener for me as to seeing “life through a windshield” came with the years that I was in the Navy. It was here that I came in contact with men from all over the country. When you work on a daily basis with people coming from such diverse places as New York City to rural Texas…you soon become aware that your own “windshield” is a fairly small prism.

The fact that we no longer have a military draft has, in my opinion, accelerated the sense of division and separateness that now characterizes the country. We are no longer thrown into the melting pot of military service where we are exposed to people and views from across the land.

I also remember the false hope that somehow the availability of the internet would bring about a sense that we lived in a global village of some kind. Instead, the internet and television have made it easier to get into our “caves” or “cocoons” where we get our news or can communicate in echo chambers with only like-minded people.

Humanity, of course, is always going to have differences based on race, ethnicity, country of origin and political opinion dependent on the structures of government we have known. We cannot overlook these differences.

But, it is important that we realize and understand that those differences create a “windshield” through which we see the world.

The truck driver rolling down the road realizes that not only is he seeing the world through a windshield…so is everyone else on the road.

With that realization comes humility. We are not the “only pebble on the beach.” There are billions of other human beings out there seeing the world through their own “windshields.” Understanding that, I think, may be the beginning of wisdom.

Rolland Kidder is a Stow resident.