The Angry White Man

I live in an apartment complex where the majority of residents are Latino. Last week in the laundry room, a three-year-old girl pointed to the very large and close to the ground windows in that room, and said, "La puerta por los niños," meaning, "The door for the children." I understood what she had said and in my very elementary and broken Spanish told her mom how cute that was, because the window certainly could be a kid-sized door.

Occasionally people ask if it is a safe place to live, clearly implying that somehow it must be dangerous to have Latinos as neighbors. Actually, we did have one instance where the police were called. A neighbor had a gun and was holed up in his apartment, shooting the walls. It was both scary and fascinating, one of those times when as long as you don't die, it's kind of exciting. He was an Anglo. Not a Latino.

The most recent displays of violence we have had in the United States, the shooting in Wisconsin and the one in Colorado, involved Anglo men.

The subject of easy access in our country to guns, combined with anger and mental illness, is a complicated one. I grew up in the kind of home where, if there was a gun present, someone easily could have been shot. I am not fond of guns, and this whole "citizens have a right to bear arms" thing has gotten really distorted in my opinion.

Some of us want to blame crime and violence on those other people, Latinos or African-Americans or someone of a different religion, those "others" who are not like us. We carefully choose our homes in safe neighborhoods, surrounding ourselves with people just like us. A place where we can be isolated and insulated from the uglier realities of life. I don't know about that. Maybe we should beware the angry white man. Maybe, instead of thinking the problem is about all those "other" people, I should look at myself and understand that we are all in this together, and I am part of the problem, too. Only then will we be motivated enough to find some solutions.

It is not someone else's problem. It is my problem. It makes me squirm a little, but the truth is this. I have met the enemy, and she is me.

Susan