Tuesday, April 10, 2007

What have I done?

It was a warm Saturday afternoon, I sat there at the coffee shop that I loved due to it's name's play on words and typed away on this essay I had to write for class. The warm sunlit coffee shop was dead, it was just me and my two barista friends. As boredom began to set in we noticed that someone had finally came for some coffee. They were two arab men. Both were well dressed, I remember seeing them pull up earlier in the day, but they never got out of the car, they just pulled away. They seemed overly excited to be in the clock filled coffee shop, but whatever that's life. It looked nice, they commented, their eyes looking down at the assortment of pastries that they never even got. It took them forever to decide what they wanted. The younger one, well shorter at least, decided on a iced vanilla latte. I rarely remember who orders what whenever they come in, but he just didn't seem like a vanilla latte type guy. There was something wrong here, their eyes were jetting from one side of the shop to the other. They weren't making eye contact with any of us. Were they nervous? It's just a latte. Did they wait for the place to be empty to come back? I began to wish my fiance, Tommy were there. He could take them, they're small. Then I began to think about it. Were they going to rob the place? What if they had a bomb? Were they going to blow this tiny coffee shop up? I needed to go to the bathroom. It had to be that way. What if it "set them off?" I made my way to the restroom making sure not to look at the two men, who in my mind were surely up to no good. I shut the door behind me making sure to turn the fan on in addition to the light. What difference this would have made I am not sure. It all began to play out in my head. The men would receive their extra girly lattes and pull out a gun. Or what I thought in my mind's eye was a gun. Bennett would storm out back, leaving Julie all alone. She would be forced to empty the drawer into the tip jar that they have already taken from the speckled counter. Bennett would return and "pump them full of lead." Then I would walk out of the bathroom crying about the whole tragedy, hoping that Bennett doesn't end up in jail and that Julie is ok. What was I thinking? I am not sure now. I know that it wasn't my normal way of thinking.
Eventually it occurred to me that I might be influenced by media after all. Was it the media that caused me to stereotype the young men or was it the way the men acted that had me all flustered? I don't know. I don't think I'll ever know, but I am sure if they had looked less foreign to me, I wouldn't have seen them as shady characters as much as weird guys. I felt racist for the rest of the day. I wasn't raised to be racist, I was raised to love everyone without prejudice. Until this day I thought I had succeeded in not judging the book by it's cover. I went home and thought about the incident over and over again. I was sure that something was wrong with those guys. They left as soon as people came into the shop. There had to be something wrong. If they were black would I have just thought they were high? What if they were Asian, wouldn't they just be normal to me? If they were white I would assuredly thought they were drunk or strung out or something. But the point in my mind was that because they were Arab I thought they would be violent, which is wrong, and I remain ashamed of it. So now all I can do is correct myself if I catch myself at it again. Or maybe I should just stop watching the news.

1 comment:

Sonya Huber said...

Such a great moment to analyze! A good start to an essay!