When I was in the 4th
grade, I had an enigmatic and menacing nemesis named Martin. He was tall,
hulking, and hunched, with straight red hair and buck teeth, and I can recall him wearing an overcoat and heavy shoes and having a backpack hung from his sloping shoulders. He
was strong and hateful and I knew he could hurt me if he ever laid hands on me,
but he was also pretty slow, and as long as I stayed alert I could keep out of
his reach.
Somehow Martin and I
ended up in a special reading class together for a short time — I remember
being told after maybe two or three sessions that I should not come back to it —
and it was at these that he revealed a strange new dimension to me. When Martin
would read, I was amazed to discover that he
could see in the text things that I could not. Even as I followed along in
my copy of the book we were reading from, he would utter words that I simply
could not see, different from and in addition to those visible to me. That made
this monster both mysterious and an object of envy to me and I wished that I
was able to see the things that he could.
Eventually, I realized
that Martin was not a magical ogre and that he was simply stupid. If my ability
to read a page of text, understand the words on it, sound out those I didn't
know, and generally comprehend it could be envisioned as a connect-the-dots
image with a hundred points, then his might have had, for example, 70. So, when
he had to connect that diminished number of dots, his lines were coarser and
less nuanced, sometimes they went to incorrect points, it was unclear how to
incorporate some of them, and the final picture he created would inevitably be
warped and incomplete.
When the mass shooting
in Munich, Germany, occurred on July 22, I was even more moved by it than I was by
other recent but similar incidents, as my family had lived there for seven years, including those when I was in high school. I am still friends with many people I knew there,
along with a handful that still live in Munich, and so I started looking at
their Facebook pages to see how they were reacting, make sure everyone was
alright, etc. While I was doing that I came across a comment from someone I had
known some 30 years ago from the old neighborhood, who for a couple of reasons
I will dub "Whitey" for purposes of this discussion. I remembered him
as being a good-natured kid and as not having any weird issues, and so before
turning in I sent him a Facebook friend request.
Next time I got online,
I had a notification on Facebook that Whitey had accepted my friend request six
hours earlier and that he had sent me a message about an hour after that. The
first thing that struck me upon reading his brief message was that he had used
a racist epithet to describe one of my friends, and then asked if I thought
that person would be offended by posts on his Facebook page. On the face of if
that is a nonsensical question and kind of confused me, because he and I being
friends would not cause my non-mutual friends to become aware of his page. It
was also disquieting that his first words to me in three decades needed to
include racist insults.
Things got stranger
still when I went to his Facebook page and, near the top of it, saw that he had
shared a post I had made more than four months ago about a book I had written
about the folklore and mythology of Ethiopia. This book covers timeless themes
and tales of things like dragons, architectural wonders created by mysterious
ancient peoples, hippopotamuses the size of islands, men that can turn into
hyenas, and the like. He appended one
comment to his re-posting of the item: "The government and corruption in
Ethiopia is noteworthy." There nothing pertinent to modern politics in my
book, which draws upon folklore going back hundreds or thousands of years,
rather than ephemeral things like the current governmental regime, so this was a really baffling and irrelevant comment. I then began
to scroll through the rest of his posts and, to my disgust, discovered the same
sort of racist, xenophobic, hatemongering posts that have become all too familiar
to me anymore.
But how had Whitey drawn
a connection between a book about folklore and the government that happens to
be in power in a particular country today? And then I remembered Martin who, as
a particularly stupid child, had filled in the blank spots in the things he could
not decipher with random words and concepts from his limited experience, and I
understood what Whitey had done. Not particularly smart to start with, unhinged
by the same 15 years of war and terror that the rest of us have also had to
deal with, Whitey had connected the limited number of dots in his mind
according to what he had nurtured and allowed to grow there. And, while the
pictures young Martin drew were merely incorrect, middle-aged Whitey's are
grotesque, misshapen, and malignant, connected not just by lines of ignorance
but also ones of hate, bigotry, and violence spawned from decades of fear,
confusion, disappointment, and growing mental illness.
And then the rest of
what had happened became strikingly and appallingly clear to me. Six hours
before I got online, Whitey had received my friend request and accepted it. He
had then spent a full hour exploring my Facebook profile and scrolling back through
at least four months of posts on my
timeline. As he did all this, he became increasingly agitated by evidence of my
love for other cultures, the many races and nations represented among my
friends, my African-American children. He then reacted by sending me a message laced with
racist insults and, right after that, unfriended me.
