The No-Rest Stop

I do not have good luck at rest stops. They always seem to invite drama for me. Tonight I pulled into a rest stop on the way home from a show in Portland, and a guy came up to me. He seemed to be slightly drunk, an unsettling thing to note about a fellow driver. I asked him how he was doing. He said he was feeling glad to be alive. I didn't probe why. We made some pleasant conversation, and then he said, "You're Irish, right?" 

I immediately got nervous. I said, "I'm Irish and Portuguese and Scottish bunch of other things." I really should have said that I'm Jewish, also. But maybe this worked out for the best.

He said, "I'm German." (Now I realize that there is nothing German about this man. His ancestors were German. The only German words he knows are "Heil" and "Hitler.")

Then he leaned uncomfortably close to me and whispered, "We're going to take our country back." This is how racism is expressed in Oregon. In whispers.

I said, "What do you mean by that?"

He said, "You know. From them." And he looked across the parking lot at a couple of other guys of indeterminate race.

Now, I could have just changed the subject. I could have shaken my head and said, "How about that Niners-Ravens game, eh?" He probably wouldn't have pressed. But I didn't. 

"I disagree," I said.

He looked surprised. In fact, I could see him sobering up, becoming more attentive almost instantly. He said, "What do you mean?" 

I said, "What do you mean we are taking our country back? This country was taken in the first place." 

"What do you mean?" he said again. 

I said, "Our white ancestors stole this land from Native Americans who were already here, and they only did it because they could profit from the land with stolen labor."

He didn't even addressed the slavery issue. He just said, "Well, the Native Americans had been fighting with each other for thousands of years."

And I said, "So had our European ancestors. They'd just figured out how to do their conquering and slaughtering on a much bigger scale. That doesn't make them better. It makes them more evil."

He said, "So what do you think it means to be an American, then?"

I said, "Being an American should be about an idea. About welcoming people to a place where they can be free just like our ancestors came to a place where they could he free. It's on the Statue of Liberty. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry yearning to be free."

He said, "But that's not in the Constitution." 

I had a suspicion this man was not a Constitutional scholar, so I didn't try to explain that the Constitution is a racist document codifying that some people are three-fifths human. Instead, I said, "This country literally had open borders until the early nineteen hundreds. That's why you and are standing here having this discussion. Trying to kick people out or keep people out or keep people down: That's un-American. Or at least I think it should be. And the people who want to tell you we need to take this country back? They are depending on your fear. I refuse to be scared of my neighbors."  

"I'm not afraid," he whispered, but then he went really quiet because just then one of the guys that he had referred to as "them" came over and asked if either of us had a tire iron. I went over to help him change a tire, and that rescued the racist who was getting a lot more than he bargained for.

I'm sharing this not because I want to toot my own horn, but because there's a lesson here. This is something I hope to teach to my son and to my students. Conversations like this are not comfortable. In fact, they can be downright scary. The guy wasn't particularly big or menacing, but he was my size and kept his hands in his coat pockets, and there were moments when I wondered what he might be holding in there. It's not always easy. There will be times when we miss these opportunities. I have. And the opportunities may be very rare. This guy would not have approached a person of color to commiserate about the dangers of "them." And for many people, talking to a stranger in this way would not have been safe. But for some of us these opportunities will be more common, and they won't be as dangerous. This is the third time I've had conversations with total strangers who thought they were talking to a fellow racist just this year. They have been emboldened by the Criminal-In-Chief. He knows how to activate them, maybe because he shares their racist views and maybe because he sees them as a means to power so he can raid the public coffers and feed his ego. But he speaks to them intentionally, and I know this because they parrot his language. They talk about making the country great again and taking the country back for people like "us," and, of course, building a wall. And they want to know if some of us are on their side. So when we have a chance, we need to try and grab those opportunities. One of the lessons that's been drilled into me painfully and repeatedly over the last few very difficult years of my life is that the people who want you to be silent, who want to avoid confrontation, who want us to dodge the most difficult conversations are doing so because they value their own comfort more than the well-being of others. This is how silence becomes complicity in evil. 

This conversation was not a pleasant experience. But my discomfort is nothing compared to the real suffering people like the guy at the rest stop would inflict on people who don't have all the privileges that I have. If I don't leap at the opportunity to speak out, I am taking advantage of the suffering of others to protect myself.  I am ashamed of the opportunities I've missed in the past, and I am grateful that tonight I got to be uncomfortable, and I'm glad I walked away unscathed so I could share this story and encourage others to do the same. 

When they whisper, speak up.