Knee Jerk...

We all have people in our lives that cause us to react irrationally.  Some people anger us, some just annoy us & others just plain creep us out.  Those are the people I want to talk about today.  Those people in our lives that just send us into reaction mode that have never given us any cause to do or feel anything towards or about them.

Yet we do feel things about them.  Our instincts kick & make our skin crawl or feel the need for fight or flight.  We recently got a new neighbor in the rent house next to us, they happen to be people of color.  I grew up with people, who if they were still alive, would be writing letters to their congressmen telling them to have these people removed immediately. They were the types to look at a person from Cuba & call them a Mexican.  If you had corrected them & told them those people were from Cuba, they'd have told you, " I don't care what part of Mexico he's from."

I know that sounds horrible & racist, but it was the time they were from & the feeling is/was pretty common around these parts.  The town I grow up in only had one little black girl living there, other than the athletes who stayed on the college campus.  It must've been holy hell for her growing up in Miami, OK in the 1970's.  My grandmother would never let me even speak to anyone of color.  She a plethora of names for them, antiquated slurs, but amazingly enough none of them were the N-word.

The funny thing was that my mother, one of the world's top ten lushes, never ever addressed anyone like that.  She never once judged someone on their skin color, religion or whatever other descriptor you could imagine.  I learned tolerance from her, but not because she was exactly tolerant.  I learned not to judge others on those matters because my mother didn't want others judging her for her own short comings.

Regardless of the reason, the fact she didn't judge them stuck with me.  Over the years I've gone to school with, been friends with & even been involved (romantically or just sexually) with people of many ethnic backgrounds.  So, it really bothers me when I have knee-jerk reactions to people that I can't explain.

There is a man who works in a local business I frequent that quite frankly just creeps me out.  I don't know why.  He has never done anything to me.  I've never heard of him doing anything untoward, but still he is Mondo Creepy!  As it turns out, he has the same affect on my roommate.  We debate, is he a serial killer?  Is he a pedophile?  Is he an ax wielding maniac that on fifth Tuesday of every month hunts down people who like local news reporters or what?

It may be fun for us to speculate this matter, but the fact is he has done nothing to merit this contemplation of his personal life.  I have no reason to believe he is any of these things, but in the back of my mind I wonder.  I think, do not make eye contact & back away as quickly as possible without being obvious.

I shouldn't feel this way, but I do.  After all don't they say that serial killers are just like everyone else?  Don't the neighbors of these killy-types generally say the killer was always the most friendly person to have for a neighbor?  Whatever, the guy still creeps me out.  All I can do is try not to act on those feelings or let him realize I feel that way.  Good luck to me on that one.