It was beginning to rain, and RMB was undecided about which hat to wear – the small straw hat he bought for the shoot – he said he was going for the hayseed look or the larger Amish hat that Moise had’s sister made for me.

He was trying to get his look together for his next album, called “Black Sheep,” because he has always seen himself as the black sheep of his family, the one struggling to figure out just where he fits in in this world. He hopes his new album will get him there. He was getting anxious, fighting the weather, the clock.

I once was a TV producer. I knew the panicked look. He needed some space to think.

“RMB,” I said, “let’s use my barn as a green room, let’s try on different things, and I’ll take your picture and show them to you, and you can decide just how you want to look.”

The young rapper brightened immediately. He knew what a Geen Room was as much as I did. It’s the room where the stars get dressed. Tidy up, do their faces, and wait to fade their audience. You see green rooms in the movies all the time. It offers space and time to think.

There, in the barn, RMB tried on my Amish hat I offered him, and he said, “this is it, this is what I want.” And he went out and had his photo taken the way he wanted it. We got pretty far for two people who had never laid their eyes on one another.

I was surprised at how much we had in common right off the bat. As the rain came down harder that night, we traded e-mails and text numbers and promised to stay in touch.

We had things to say to each other, much as has happened with my Amish Friend Moise. It is very hard to hate people you know.

Perhaps I am changing, or perhaps the world is changing. These are not the friends I expected to have in Washington County, a struggling farm community (with New York City refugees mixed in)  halfway from New York to Canada.

It is unusual to see six or seven African-American men in upstate New York visiting our farm or doing anything else. The black visitors I’ve spoken with don’t like the dark, the quiet, and the country cops who follow them everywhere they go.

It is even more unusual for the group to include a Rapper from the city with a small entourage and two photographers in tow.

I realized right away – so did Maria – that something larger was happening than a simple photoshoot.

We both wondered why it was so easy to talk to these kids – many years younger than each of us – when it was so hard for so much of the country to speak to one another at all.

RMB’s visit deeply touched people. I wondered why. Then I thought about it. Because hatred and rage are now what we want, the visit yesterday was a tonic that revealed to me just how many people want a gentler and more compassionate country.

RMB is the future, not Governor Abbott. I believe we will have the future we imagine and dream of, that’s the way it works.

Although RMBDell presents himself as the now-familiar rapper Badass, blink and all, he was a sweet, gentle, and thoughtful man. He had a mask to put on, as we all do, and can take it off when he wants to.

We became friends almost immediately, and there is a lot to think about regarding that. Only one of these creative men had set foot in the country or ever seen a sheep or a donkey.

Yet one would have thought they grew up on a farm with animals; they are so easy and wise with them.

I saw the same thing happening with Maria – she and they were laughing, talking, trading tales. She ever got maternal and offered them food and the bathroom. (She does not often do that to visitors she doesn’t know well.)

RMB and I joked that we each learned at least one thing from the other. He learned that people living on farms in rural America could be welcoming and helpful.

He learned that he has a gift for talking to animals and being with them; they respond to his calm and gentleness. All of our animals are prey animals, wary of strangers. Every one of them flocked to RMB and trusted him to touch them. He had never seen a sheep or a donkey.

I learned that even Badass rappers could be sweet as pussycats face to face.

Why was this so easy for them for me (and Maria?) Why is it so hard for most of the country? Why has our noblest  American traditions of inclusion and mixing and offering refuge suddenly under so much angry challenge?

Why has our welcome of immigrants, refugees, people from the South coming North suddenly been a matter of such hatred, bigotry, and tension?

Outside of the Deep South and the KKK, there was no such thing as White Christian Nationalism, which seemed a thing of the past, or at least something weak and fading in our culture.

I guess I have to accept that hate never really dies; you have to keep fighting it.

There was plenty of racial tension, especially in the South. Still, I never heard anyone, public official or private citizen, openly embrace the notion that government should keep people of color and “shithead” countries out of the country for most of my life.

I couldn’t imagine a President saying refugees should be banned because they were likely to be rapists, murderers, and terrorists.  Or that half the country would nod their heads and cheer him on. Presidents led us, they called for our better angels, not our worst.

This was my first experience with open hate and demagoguery. It shook me to the core.

The argument that people from other places don’t belong here is like a stab in the heart when I think of how many refugees and innocent victims were saved by America, including my family and me.

Although I live on a rural farm with few non-white people, I didn’t grow up in the country. I was born and raised in Providence, R.I. The black neighborhood was a block away; the Armenian neighborhood was a few yards away; an Italian neighborhood was a quarter mile down the road.

My grandparents lived in the Jewish/Yiddish/German/Russian enclave was near the state capital. The Irish were down the road a bit. My family lived in a mixed working-class neighborhood by a big cemetery.

We were a melting pot, and it was warm and good, if not always easy.

Afterward, I lived and worked in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Baltimore, and Atlantic City. I met gays and straights, trans and fundamentalists, Republicans and Democrats, cops and farmers, crooks and saints,  terrorists and murderers.

I met every kind of person.

I can’t help but think that Americans are quick to judge each other because we no longer know one another. We sit behind our screens day and night and let strangers and losers do our governing for us.

Most of our fighting is with ghosts on social media; we rarely argue face to face with anyone; it is so easy to fight the coward’s way behind a cell or computer screen.

Our sense of common ground is being torn apart by the machines that have come between us, our fellow humans.

My early life was no paradise, but it was no cesspool of hate either. Much separated us – privilege, wealth, prejudice.

But we had no choice but to get to know each other. We mixed in school, on busses, sports teams, in playgrounds and stores. Bigotry existed, but it was never endorsed by our leaders or turned into a national policy.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it isn’t a question of my being a racist or not.

It’s a question of not being so estranged from people who are different from me that they frighten me or cause me to succumb to the lies of fascists and hatemongers. The idea that half of my beloved country endorses such hate and cruelty, and inhumanity is something that has broken my heart, and I will be struggling to understand it for the rest of my life.

I will also not let it destroy or turn me into a quivering coward. I’ll keep helping refugees and trying to do good until I drop. That’s my response to the White Christian Nationalists and their sociopathic leader. Go to Hell.

I will never succumb to the selfish and hateful pandemic that is the true threat to our country, not the poor refugees struggling to live.

Sometimes, I am grateful that I won’t be around to see years of this hatred and ignorance in the night.

RMB (Respect My Brilliance) reminds me to be more hopeful than that.

We can’t love each other if we don’t know one another if we only meet and speak with one another via machines. The rapper crowd didn’t come here as black coming to a white farm; they came as musicians looking for the right backdrop. We were tickled to help them out.

Social media doesn’t cut it, neither do texts or e-mails, the favorite toys of the Christian WHite Nationalist Army and their spiritual guide, the Cowardly Tweeter, and the fearful progressive struggling to cope with this onslaught of selfishness and rage.

The minute RMB showed up, along with Cherokee, his very skilled photographer, we sensed that we were brothers, creatives working hard to live our lives. The many differences between us – we didn’t get to that, but I’m sure they are there – didn’t matter.

It wasn’t a troop of black guys coming to invade our farm; it was RMB trying to find himself, supported by decent, loving, and honest friends. It was a fellow creative asking for some help.

We were focused on what we shared, not what we didn’t.

RMB both knew what we were both about at the core, the isolation, inability to please parents, the sense of Black Sheepness that has followed us everywhere.

RMB is a correctional officer; he knows pain and sorrow in a way I will never grasp. Yet here we were, on my little farm, talking about agents and marketing and social media and breaking through. We were the same thing, really, seekers in wolves’ clothing, sheep at heart.

We shared our biggest fear – that we couldn’t cut it, that nobody would read or listen, that our voices would never be heard, that we would sink into the great American tragedy, the great American sinkhole – failure—the failure to find our bliss and keep it, the fear that never goes away.

The fear that nobody wants to see or read or hear what we create.

That was enough. We came together as colleagues, one seeking help, the other honoring the code of true creatives to help. We’ve both been there, and so has Maria.

It turns out this was a much stronger bond than race or wealth, or fame. I wondered yesterday if we would ever see RMB again or speak with him.

Maria and RMB  have been exchanging e-mails and texts all day. He says he wants to come back and spent more time with the sheep and donkeys. He is, he said, a lifelong animal nut.