Murder She Watched

Department of Justice

As much as women like to joke about how predictable creatures men are. My wife begins each day nearly the same way, she puts up the dishes from the dishwasher, turns on the coffee maker, and watches murder mysteries. It doesn’t matter if it’s Law and Order, Murder She Wrote, 48 Hours, or Dateline; each one bleeds through the door of my office as if the TV were sitting next to me. But it’s a predictable habit I’ve grown used to over the last 30+ years.

The world is filled with predictable behaviors such as holding grudges, bigotry, hatred, and paranoia. But at the same time usually on a more individual level there’s kindness, empathy, generosity, and forgiveness. It’s funny to me how the two seem to live such a symbiotic existence. I guess it’s easier to feel hatred when indoctrinated into a herd mentality. To look for a boogeyman to blame all our troubles on, when in reality it’s usually us.

I now live in a mixed racial neighborhood. It would be easy for me to be suspicious of my neighbors considering I was brought up in an ethically all white middle class neighborhood, where whites and blacks didn’t live together and each “knew their place”. But at the same time I grew up during integration of the South where at one time I would have gone to the neighborhood mostly white schools. But instead ended up being bused to majority black schools on the west side of the city.

During my elementary years things were scary with effigies of people being hung and burned in front of the school. But inside, especially after entering junior high we were used to being pretty much the minority and got along well with our classmates and majority black teachers. I suppose the thought I’m trying to make is, herd mentality is an easy excuse to not look inside ourselves and sweep out the dirt from under the rug. To blame one group over another is a fool’s folly. How about we put aside the hate and paranoia for a minute, for an ounce of acceptance and tolerance