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.
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