enjoyed your points, millie210 and Pete Zahut. Yes, we get a unique lesson from our experiences, whatever they were, Nazi concentration camps or the streets of Calcutta or something in between.
Would I have learned more as a freshman at the University of Washington than being a 17 year old on the streets of Brownsville, Texas, with Spanish by far the predominant language? Imagine the cultural shock of being dropped off 8 AM on Saturday morning on the main business street, then picked up at noon in what could just have well been Mexico City, with loud music, business owner's who actually cared about religion in my face. Later that week, I was at the Port of Brownsville boarding ships from Norway, Liberia and England, talking "the truth."
Maybe, my eventual wife and I shouldn't have agreed to move to central Arkansas when I was 21 and she 25 where I replaced a pedophile Congregation Servant. Again, cultural shock, working for minimum wage at a chicken plant and wood product factory under unsafe conditions, meeting a wide variety of folk, unsavory and savory.
What about our ten years as basically the only whites at the last unsegregated black congregation in Little Rock, Arkansas? Do we not have some insight few have experienced?
None of this is meant to undersell the harm done by the high control, dumbass religious cult known as Jehovah's Witnesses. I can actually agree with the uneducated, illiterate woman I met in the cotton field of Carden Bottoms, Arkansas in 1970. She tried to prove to me that "Jehovah was the last church in the Bible." She was right as rain, but couldn't prove it flipping through her Bible upside down.