This afternoon, while waiting in line at the post office, I became a stupid moron. I have no excuse. I simply clammed up. Today, I was Part of the Problem.
I had five packages and was already feeling like an asshole due to the long time it was going to take me at the kiosk. But my packages were nothing compared to what was about to transpire. A little old lady behind me, wearing a neon pink jacket and a red visor over her frizzy, bottle-blond hair took a shining to me, as it were.
We exchanged pleasantries and I was lulled into a kind of small talk stupor. You know how that goes... automatic pilot. Heat, humidity, bargain shopping. She told me that she had moved to my small city from a large, urban center called Brampton. Oh yes, good. Do you like it here? Yes! "Brampton is unliveable anymore." she croaked.
"Oh I hear it's getting very overpopulated." I replied. And I wasn't lying - I had literally just heard that the day before. But that's not what she meant.
She meant "those people" were "taking over the place."
And I knew right away which people she was referring to. In fact, there were three of "them" right ahead of me.
She went on, in spite of my silence and my inability to meet her eyes.
"They're calling Canada 'Canadesh' now. They're calling Brampton 'Bramladesh!"
Oh shut up! Shut Up! I thought. I must have looked like an idiot. I was staring at the 3 brown-skinned people up ahead, hoping they couldn't hear. One of them turned around. He didn't look at me directly, or he would have seen that I wasn't party to this. He would have seen.. wouldn't he?
He didn't ever see. Neither did his wife or the other man who obviously wasn't part of his group. No one saw - they only heard. And what they didn't hear was me telling this lady that her opinons were offensive to me. They didn't hear me tell her to stop being a racist. They didn't hear me stand up for them.
Because I didn't.
No. I stood silently, while pictures of 19 hijackers, recently arrested Canadian terror suspects, and prisoners of war went through my head and I actually debated with myself whether or not it was proper in this day and age to overtly and possibly rudely shut down an old lady based on her racism when the object of her racism was indeed the object of some sort of psuedo-global racism. It seemed so politically charged and dangerous. It seemed like I couldn't possibly be correct. I feared I'd be alone in the line up, getting yelled at by paranoid people who all feel that GWB is right and all brown people who look like Muslims should be put in their place by all of us non-Muslims. I felt allied with the people she was insulting and yet she didn't recognize me as such. And because I was silent, neither did they.
I voluntarily went into the chickenshit no-man's land of toeing the line.
Oddly, when I got to the counter and the lady working there was very rude to me, I actually couldn't figure out why. I was so overwhelmed with shame about what the brown people were thinking that I forgot to worry about what other white people might think. It dawned on me later. At least the post office clerk had the guts to give me the ice-cold shoulder. It's more than I had the guts for.
Let this be my rewind button, and my lesson. It won't happen again. And I hope all of you can learn frm it to - in case your nerve ever fails you at the crucial moment my advice is to force it. Your only other option is to do nothing. And I can tell you from experience - it just isn't worth it.