Chilling

...and I ain't just talkin about the weather.

Just got back from the Seventh Circle of Hell, better known as our local grocery store. I usually have at least a couple of things to bitch about after making a trip to Kroger, but it wasn't bad at all despite the single-digit temps today.

No, what chilled me...kinda made the hair on the back of my neck wanna jump up and do the Macarena...was what I encountered when I got home.

I know I've mentioned several times how much I like living where we do. Our small apartment complex is diverse. Very diverse, actually, as far as ethnicity and socio-economic background goes. We have a few doctors, a few nurses, a couple of city and/or county employees, a lot of retired men and women. There are also a lot of Middle-Easterners.

It's not at all uncommon to see women in their full-length birkas, faces covered, in the parking lot with their children or pulling in in their cars from the grocery store or wherever.

Today was no exception. As I pulled in, I noticed that one woman in the next building over was pulling grocery sacks out of the trunk of her car as her two little boys, probably ages 2 and 4, played on the small lawn that's just adjacent to where she parked. As I slowly cruised by on the way to my parking spot, I noticed that the older of the boys had taken a 'firing stance'...and was pointing a toy gun...at ME.

My first reaction was mild horror. Then I got pissed.

After I got all my grocery bags inside, I made a cup of coffee and sat down to think about this...to try to figure out just exactly what pissed me off so bad.
I've come to the conclusion that part of what made me so mad was my own...I dunno...loss of innocence, I guess. Twenty years ago, I'd have thought it was cute. Little boys playing cowboys and indians. Or gangsters. Or any number of things little kids play with toy guns. Hell, I did it myself. When I was five or six, I wanted to be a shoot-em-up cowboy and I had quite a collection of toy guns.

Today, when a little Middle-Eastern kid pointed a toy gun at me, all I could think about was "What in the HELL are your parents teaching you?"

It may be perfectly innocent on the parents' part. Maybe they look at it like we did twenty years ago. But do they even think about how utterly bad it looks? Especially today? I detest even using this phrase, but do they realize just how politically incorrect it is for their little kid to be pointing a toy gun at an American?

Then I got to thinkin...what if it's more sinister than that? What if...just what if...they're teaching their children that killing people who do not believe the same way as they do is ok. Is, in fact, expected.

Then I got to thinkin that maybe I'm just paranoid.

Am I being paranoid? Am I being too thin-skinned? Am I thinkin 'mountain' when I should be thinkin 'molehill'?

It just really pisses me off that I should even hafta ask myself those questions in the first damn place.