I do not consider myself a prejudiced person at all, however, there are some gentlemen living in my building I am afraid of (and, yes, I'm going to say it) because of their ethnicity.
Ever since 9/11, I have been afraid of Al Qaeda; now it's ISIS. My own daughter, when she was around 8, would not go into the back warehouse of our store where the bathroom was. We didn't know why until one day she told me. We had some furniture of a friend stored back there, and she thought Osama Bin Laden was hiding behind the sofa.
When I told her Bin Laden would not be in hiding in a small town in Texas, she said, "But they say they can't find him, Mommy. Here would be a good place to hide."
Anyway, I do have Muslim friends who I have been asking questions about their religion, trying to overcome my fears of Gihad, etc. I guess the ISIS beheadings and kidnappings have brought a lot of fears back.
In our building, there are a lot of families who fit the racial sterotyping of "terrorists" like you see in the news. A mom, a dad, two to three children. I get in the elevator with them and I just freeze with fear. Not hate, not anger but fear. I know they don't like my dogs. Sometimes they choose to wait for the next elevator. It doesn't offend me one bit.
But my thoughts center around the fact that the terrorists are alway saying they are going to get Americans where they hurt the most. My fear is that they are going to hurt our children, that they have placed all these hidden cells all over America, ever since 2001. It's been fourteen years. A lot of trained terrorists have had time to be trained, come over here, make lives for themselves unnoticed. My fear is that one day or close in time, each of these terrorists will position themselves in our schools and/or daycare centers and blow our children sky high.
So today I am typing all of this out with the hope that none of this will happen. I leave you with this quote from Mayou Angelou:
"Hate. It has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet."
Namaste,
~b~
