Chicken Soup for the Soul of America (23 page)

But, unfortunately, not unique,
I thought. I didn't feel bad; I felt angry.

I looked back toward the little girls' department. I saw the Muslim lady holding a dress and looking at me. She dropped her eyes, put the dress back and turned to walk away. I thought she must have heard our exchange. I had an idea.

I asked her out for coffee. I don't know what made me think that a total stranger would go out for coffee, but she said yes. Then, much to my surprise, two of the women at the cash register asked if they could come, too. There we were, four strangers about to become friends!

We only spent an hour together, but it was enough time to reassure this young woman that there are more people with good hearts than hardened ones; at least there were that morning in Nordstrom's department store. We discussed how horrific the attacks had been, how everyone we knew was shocked and saddened, and how we knew that many more people would die as our nation went to war.

As we were leaving, our Muslim friend said, “You are all very kind. You didn't have to do this. It's not the first time someone has reacted to me that way, and it won't be the last. And there probably isn't much anyone can do to change the mind of people like that.”

I thought for a moment about how I could explain to this woman why I did what I did. It wasn't really for her. I really did it to make myself feel better. I did it—we all did it—because it felt like the right thing to do. It appealed to our sense of justice, our sense of decency.

We might never be able to influence people like the woman whose remark had unnerved me. But at least I had made myself feel better. If nothing else, I had made three new friends.

That made four of us—four against one—focusing on what unites us, makes us human, instead of what divides us and makes us something less.

I hadn't been quick enough to think of a retort to that one woman's barb. And even if I had, probably nothing I said would have made a difference. But it wouldn't have been enough anyway to simply react. We must also act, and act positively, humanly, showing our best selves.

Going shopping, helping someone find the right size, going for coffee—they were acts that could show at least one nice lady wrapped in a head scarf that those who kill might destroy human beings, but they couldn't touch the human spirit.

It wasn't much, just a cup of coffee. But it was a start.

Marsha Arons

Reprinted with permission of Jimmy Margulies.

The Ominous Sound:
Racist Assumptions

I
realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

Edith Cavell

When you've finally turned off the television because you can't stand any more, when the front door is locked and the cat is fed and the night sky is utterly silent, it's just you and your thoughts.

Late Tuesday night, I recalled my father, about fifty years ago, telling me for the first time about Pearl Harbor.

He described the clenched jaws he saw that afternoon on the streets of New York, the disbelief on every face, the astonishment at how life can deal from the bottom of the deck.

And then, after about twenty-four hours, he saw resolve. Not just to get mad or get even or both. The resolve to go forward by upholding our country's best traditions, our very reasons for existing.

On the Red Line yesterday morning, about twenty-four hours after the horrors of September 11, I saw what I had feared I would see.

A man was sitting near the back door of the fourth car. He was wearing a suit and tie. He was reading the
Washington Post.
He was obviously of Arab extraction.

A woman sat across from him. She was obviously not of Arab extraction.

She stared at the man for about four stops. She was apparently trying to work up the courage to say something to him. Near Cleveland Park, she bolted over and said, accusingly, right in his face, “Why?”

The man was startled. He put down his paper and asked the woman to repeat herself.

“Why? Why did you people do this?”

The man's face flashed through fear, anger, caution and confusion. He said, very calmly, in perfect, unaccented English, “Ma'am, I am an American citizen. I am just as upset as you are.”

But of course, what he really meant was, “Please don't blame me or harm me just because I am obviously of Arab extraction.”

I fear that many more such confrontations are coming.

I can't imagine a repeat of the internment camps of World War II. In an age of Big Media, in an America that's far more diverse than it was sixty years ago, no broad-brush “security step” could last a day, much less get started.

No, I'm far more worried about the small-scale sort of thing I saw on the subway (and saw aboard a Metrobus in the late 1970s, the day after Iranians kidnapped several dozen employees of the U.S. Embassy).

This isn't the horrid, vicious racism of lynchings and church bombings. But it is just as profound and just as corrosive.

It damns first and asks questions later.

It is dangerously ignorant of our history and our glory.

It is especially galling in a city as varied and as sophisticated as Washington.

Ask your kids about the reflex I saw in the subway. Ask them whether, when they take the measure of someone, they see skin color first, or a swarthy complexion, or a nose that is or isn't broad.

If they are smart—and kids are always smart—they will tell you that race is another generation's hang-up, that it doesn't take you inside someone's soul. When it comes to race, they'll tell you they aren't their fathers' Oldsmobiles.

A fifteen-year-old called me Tuesday afternoon.

He is Iranian-American. He said he was scared to death when he first heard the awful news.

He feared retaliation against himself and his family.

However, he began to feel a lot better shortly after he got home from school. One by one, his buddies from West Springfield High School (all of them white) called to dissect the disastrous day with him.

Not one referred to Arabs as a group or tried to lay the events at his or their doorstep. “It made me feel wonderful,” the boy said.

But then, the father of one friend jumped on the line and ordered the conversation terminated right away. The father didn't explain, “But I think I know why,” this fifteen-year-old said.

I think I know why, too.

It makes my skin crawl.

This boy was born at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He has spent his entire life in northern Virginia. He told me he wears Nike sneakers and a faded University of Virginia sweat shirt, like thousands of other kids.

But now he is being judged by his ethnic origin—before the judge even knows whether Arabs were responsible for the horrors of Tuesday.

You will hear an awful lot over the next weeks about how we Americans must come together.

You will see huge increases in church attendance.

You will read stories about people who donate blood six times.

You will see gas station owners who try to charge $5 a gallon shouted back down to $1.45.

But I hope you'll hear shouts, too, about the fundamental strength of our country: the pot that melts us all.

If we are going to summon the will to beat terrorism, we need to check our underpinning first. It won't be very sturdy if we judge books by their covers.

My father made much the same point in that conversation we had fifty years ago.

He told me about an Irish-Catholic fellow who clapped him on the back as they stood on a midtown Manhattan street corner on December 7, 1941.

This man never asked my father if he was Irish, Catholic or Martian. He just said they were all in this together, and they'd all have to stand or fall as one.

True then. True now.

Bob Levey

Long-Distance Call

T
he power to unite is stronger than the power to divide.

From an AT&T commercial after September 11, 2001

To say that the events of September 11 changed the world forever is a gross understatement. For many of us adults who had never lived through a war fought on our own soil, it brought home to us our own vulnerability. For our children, September 11 meant fear and the certain knowledge that there was indeed the most heinous kind of evil in the world. I was saddened by my newfound knowledge and angered by my children's loss of innocence.

I watched the images of the World Trade Center collapsing from my home in Chicago. Like everyone else, I was stunned and horrified. But my friend Sharon and I had one more reason to be fearful. Both of us have children at school in New York City. When we were finally able to reach them and were assured they were safe, we hugged each other and cried. Still, both of us heard the fear in our children's voices. As mothers separated from our kids, we ached to reassure them. We couldn't. But one evening as I sat in Sharon's kitchen, she and I learned that sometimes the comfort our children need can come from others.

Sharon was making iced tea. The weather had been unseasonably warm in Chicago. It was hot in New York also as I knew from a conversation I had with my daughter, Rachael, earlier that day. Sharon's phone rang. It was her son, Jake, and thinking that I would enjoy hearing the conversation, Sharon put him on the speakerphone.

But Jake's voice quavered as he said, “Ma, we're in trouble.” I reached over to take Sharon's hand.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“We're in Harlem. Our bus broke down. We're at 135th Street and Amsterdam.”

Jake attends Yeshiva University, an all-male college for Orthodox Jewish boys all the way north in Washington Heights. Stern college, Yeshiva University's sister school, is located in midtown Manhattan. The schools provide a shuttle bus so the kids can get together. Typically the boys go to the girls' school because there is so much more for them to do in Midtown.

For the most part, the YU boys had never had any problems with other racial or ethnic groups and were used to traveling freely throughout the city. After September 11, we wanted our kids, as Mayor Giuliani said, to go back to living their lives normally. This meant not being afraid to take the bus into Midtown on a warm summer night to visit friends.

But now Jake was telling his mother that the bus had broken down in the middle of Harlem. To make matters worse, the electricity in the area was on back-up and few stores along Amsterdam were lit. For all that we teach our kids not be prejudiced, when Jake said that a group of about twenty black youths had begun to circle the bus, we were scared.

The bus driver had already called for another bus and notified the police. But the New York City police had their hands full with a city in turmoil. And no crime had been committed.

Sharon and I looked at each other, imagining the scene. She told Jake to keep the doors and windows locked and to wait. She wouldn't let him hang up. We could hear sounds in the background. The Harlem boys were shouting for the Yeshiva boys to open the doors and come out.

“It's so hot in here, Mom.” Jake said. “I don't know how much longer we can stay holed up in here.”

Eight hundred miles away and only connected by a cell phone, we weren't much use to her son.

Then Jake said, “Ma, one of those kids went and got a lady from one of the buildings. She's coming over. Wait. . . . She's yelling for us to come out.” At this point, Jake must have held the phone out so Sharon and I could hear. Sharon's face broke into a wide grin.

“You boys come outta there this minute. Ain't you got no sense? It's a hundred degrees in there. You get yourselves out here and into that drugstore and get yourselves a drink this minute!”

We recognized that tone! We had used it ourselves many times. It was an order any mother would give to a stubborn child!

“Jacob! You do just what she says. And let me talk to her,” Sharon said decisively.

Then that mother's voice said, “This here's Bessie. I'm Duane's mama. Duane and his friends was trying to get your boys outta this hot bus. They need to go stand inside where it's cool and get theyselves a soda. What's the matter with them? Ain't they got good sense?”