Fighting Words

Fighting Words

Sometimes bad stuff happens, but I feel mostly insulated from the meanness I know exists in my hometown. Yes, I’ve been burglarized (once) and honked at (at least once a day), but I’d never experienced what it’s like to be the target of blind hate—until just a few days ago.

Along with a few hundred other Houstonians, I’d lined up outside a local bookstore to have a former president sign a copy of his new memoir. This particular author happens to be a pretty polarizing public figure, even after his retirement to private life.

The crowd was friendly, and the line moved rather quickly.

The real “fun” came when I walked out of the store. I hadn’t noticed the knot of protesters forming earlier, but about a dozen unhappy citizens were corralled on the sidewalk by a small police contingent, and what their group lacked in numbers they made up for in noisy venom. Their target? Anyone who’d purchased said president’s book and exited the store with it. Including me.

When I was just a few yards from the group, a woman holding a painted sign screamed at me, spit flying, “Hater! Koran burner!” And those are just the words I can repeat. I was stunned. I was the last person she might expect to burn a book—any book. But the book under my arm, and that alone, was enough to make me the object of her fury. She’d decided what she believed about me, and it wasn’t good. From one fact, she’d made a story.

I’m not a screamer, but I am a story crafter. My sidewalk accuser made me question whether I’d ever written anyone’s story with as little data as she’d used to write mine. And I’m afraid I have. I’ve made quick judgments. Assumptions. I’ve been just as wrong about others as she was about me. Her fighting words made me sad for us both and determined to not repeat the mistake, with or without words.

There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Proverbs 12:18, ESV