RANDOM RUNNING TOUGHTS

     A careful analysis of the world we live in is frightening, to say the least,  and maybe it always has been, I am not sure.   There was a time when I would feel perfectly safe getting up at three or four a.m., getting in my car and driving the three and a half miles to Walmart on my biweekly shopping trip to buy household supplies.  My unobtrusive 4 cylinder vehicle would be parked 20 to 25 feet from  the store’s only open door, my debit card was in my jeans pocket (I quit carrying any significant amount of cash years ago) and in I would go, grab a basket from the cart  corral, and begin amassing the needed purchases. You know…stuff like toothpaste, mouth wash, bath soap, Kleenex, laundry detergent, any extra school supplies my sons required and those extra large boxes of cereal….nothing extravagant.  I might take a few moments to look at the quick sale items for fancy tee shirts or sweat shirts in the fellows’  appropriate sizes (with 5 active growing sons, I always tried to keep a little ahead of the growth spurts and the “he wore my shirt to school argument” and the “I forgot to wash my clothes “ game).  Out of Walmart within less than an hour, I would duck through Walgreens or Krogers  for a weekly supply of milk and orange juice.  By 5:30, I would be home, unloading the car and making a bee line to the shower.  By 6:30 almost all of us had to be out of the house….me to work and my sons on their way to the school bus stop.  I needed to be off the hill before the bus runs started because of the 17 mile drive to work.

     I never thought about personal safety……after all we live in a somewhat sleepy small suburban town. Our house had a perfectly good alarm system one of whom just might be asleep in the passenger seat of my car…..a 12 year old lab mix…who loved riding in the car.   Her Belgian Shepherd mate and their offspring would be lying on the living room floor of the house peacefully sleeping…never waking fully unless a strange car (or human) came up our hill.  My traveling companion has now crossed the rainbow bridge and my sense of safety has literally vanished.  The fragility of black men’s existence confronts me every day…..on the internet…..on television….in casual daily life.    As the mother of sons…the grandmother of a adolescent male….the racist atmosphere being created by a certain political candidate and his supporters daily supports the unthinkable rhetoric of hate that in the last year has become permissible in American society.'

      A friend, an immigrant of Middle Eastern  descent….fears sending her young adult son to her own church…..her feeling  (and reasoning) is that he is safer attending church with his Christian father!  I want to tell her she is wrong…but I can’t…..because my fear is that she is right.    My adult son….driving his car in the town he has called home for more than 30 years  comes to a stop at a traffic light behind a pickup truck proudly displaying Ku Klux Klan bumper stickers….in broad daylight!  My stomach is still churning and no…it is not gas.  Two months ago….two of my sons were driving in the through lane in front of a shopping center 1.5 miles from the house and an angry male of another race became livid because they didn’t stop the car to let him merge into the through lane from a turn lane in moving traffic no less. This other driver was so irate that he followed them home (on a dead end street off  a dead end street)! A call to police brought two  squad cars. The officers were able to diffuse the situation but……my sons were followed HOME and this clown blocked our driveway!   Stopped at the neighborhood gas station one afternoon, one son pumping gas and the other decided to go in for some Gatorade.  A high school aged couple (mixed race) strolled down the side street to the main  drag  which goes downtown and just as my youngest son walks out of the gas station….a female voice screeches a racial epithet from a passing car at the young couple….several times.    My youngest jogs up to the couple to chat for a supportive moment as the passing car speeds off.

     Isolated incidents? Doubtful.    In isolation, each incident could be blown off and forgotten in time but when the time frame narrows to four months and each event occurs less than 2 miles away from a home we have lived in for 36 years….the events become more unsettling. A new pattern of “acceptable” behavior is emerging and this behavior is perturbing at best and frightening at worst.   As a nation, the face we display to the world is supposed to be better than this.  Sadly, I think we are fooling ourselves.

FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER 9/11

Will I ever forget 9/11/1?  No WAY.  As a country, as a people, we had always taken pride in the fact that we had NEVER been faced with an attack (of war) on our own soil.   (Pearl Harbor was technically not a part of the United States when it was attacked  during WW II. Hawaii  did not become a state until 1959 and you birthers can STFU since President Obama was born in August of 1961.)

My classroom  was occupied with students  reasonably on task that morning when I heard a key in my door. I looked up and in walked a student, “Ms. Jane…..turn on the TV…they flew a plane into the World Trade Center!”  He grabbed the remote off my desk and turned on the television set. I was so shocked that I never asked where he got the key to my classroom…..but he knew there was a large screen (31 inch)  television in my room purchased by my Spanish 3-4  classes.)

In silent shock, my students and I watched the unfolding horror.  They began to scoot their chairs closer to my desk until they surrounded my corner of the room. The stunned silence in the classroom was deafening as we watched the unfolding horror…..the second plane hitting the tower…the collapse of the building  and the utter devastation….of World Trade…the Pentagon.  The bell rang for class to end, most of the students DID NOT MOVE.  I flew down the hall to my friend’s classroom and yelled at her to call her daughter (who worked at the Pentagon).  She looked at me like I was crazy and all I could say was…”Call her NOW!”  Ran back to my room, pulled my AT&T calling card out of my portfolio and frantically dialed my brother’s number in suburban Washington.   To my surprise and shock, he answered the phone and all I could say was …”Are you okay?” (I remembered that after the riots when Martin Luther King was killed…the government had blocked phone communication in and out of  D.C. )  To this day, I don’t remember any other part of our discussion.  I remember my friend coming to my room to say she had finally talked to a friend of her daughter’s and her daughter was okay….hadn’t been in the Pentagon that day.

Numbness set in…as a side effect of the shock.  Students sort of wandered the building looking for a seat near a television they could watch…the building was eerily silent. Probably for the first time in their teen age lives, the young people were emotionally shaken….this catastrophe was bigger than whatever violence they saw/felt/experienced in their neighborhood…..especially as speculation  about the number of people who died began.

Fifteen years later…time and War has moved on. At least one student I know of was killed in battle in Iraq.  I went to his visitation….not his funeral…the school building has been torn down….my friends and I have long since retired.   Many students have gone to War….a kid from the neighborhood was killed in battle….the young man my children call their “youngest brother” has been deployed three times and come home safely. More people have died in War than 9/11 claimed and the empty spaces in the hearts of a nation still ache.

For some reason….the idiots who own cable news…think it’s time to rehash that horrible day.  I refuse to turn on the television….because I DO REMEMBER….to the end of my days….I will NOT forget. It is NOT a day to be celebrated or to be made into unthinking political fodder.   The extreme HATE which  created  a 911, which fomented two wars in the 21^st Century, which continually stirs up religious,  racial , social, political and yes even gender anathema in this world is  a direct representation of pure EVIL rampant in our society and it needs to be stamped out and erased from the human psyche. My prayer today is for the HATRED to end unequivocally.