Get it Out, Get it Out

So the other night I trucked on out for an evening run about 8 PM; the P-nut was down and I had reached the very pregnant friend for whom I am hosting a mama-to-be party on Sunday and needed to confirm some details with. And I knew it was chilly because it had been chilly when I got home so I put on some appropriate layers. And I would say less than a mile in, I realized I had hit my wussified cut off for no longer being able to run outside....and I'm not sure if it was the cold, the wind or a combination of both....because though exhilirating in its own way, I hate that taste of iron in the back of my throat and knowing that the hardest burn I was feeling at that point was in my chest and not my quads or gluts. Now I know that there are plenty of people in the DC area who run year round -- it's not like we get so much snow or anything -- but I was hoping for maybe a few more warmer evening before I have to retire it for the season :(

And I might not have even gone out, but I really needed to get out of the house and do something physical because of somethign a co-worker and friend of mine said to me yesterday. This co-worker is actually the older sister of a guy I went to high school with and the whole family is Jewish, but while she is Conservative, her brother has become Orthodox and married himself an equally Orthodox woman and proceeded to had some kids. The brother's wife has apparently been ranting on about how she is afraid that if Obama gets elected that there will be a holocaust against Jews in America, that the PLO supporting Obama is the same as Obama supporting them, that all ties with Israel will be lost, that she and her babies are likely to be killed in this supposed race war, that there were plenty of Jews in Germany who supported Hitler. Now clearly she is voting for McCain and her husband (the one I went to school with, the brother of my co-worker) is as well, but mostly because he is in a higher income bracket and is looking at that vote as a way to protect his money; he doesn't all together buy into these race war ideas. And when my co-worker told me all of this, she was saying it because she is trying to figure out how to avoid talking to her sister-in-law at all about politics for at least the next month because beyond the racism in what was said, she and her husband are Obama supporters -- if for no other reason than under McCain's plans, they would stop being able to get health insurance. So she was rightfully fuming about someone saying something so ignorant and we joked about not being able to allow Abigail to play with her twin boys who are just three months younger. But the more I thought about these statements, the more they hurt, and I wasn't angry at her telling me but I was just so angered by that sentiment being out there. Basically what this woman is saying is that someone just like my daughter, someone with a white mother and a black father who was then raised in a form of Christianity, would want to start a new wave of anti-Semitic genocide. And this is a woman that at some get-together my co-worker might have held, I might just as easily have had a conversation with about nap patterns and sippy cups and other mundane mama BS. And while I have been trying to prepare myself for awhile now to help educate my daughter about what the world may or may not have in store for her, it cut into me that such vitriol was really so close to home. I can distance myself from the KKK and from Louis Farrakhan, two groups that both hate what my family stands for, because they are just that...distant. But I can't distance myself from the neighbor or the family of a friend whose thinkings and leanings aren't nearly so clear cut...or at least not so clear cut until something makes them think it is OK to reveal the darkness in their thoughts and hearts. And so totally irrationally, I want to show up at her doorstep and ask her if she is afraid of this little girl who wants to hear "I'm a little Teapot" over and over and has memorized how to "count" to 12...and for that matter, to show up with Brian and ask her if she is afraid of this man who teaches 6 and 7 year olds for a living. Are we so threatening? Because we are the same as the Obama family -- a mix of races, people trying to raise good kids -- and she is apparently afraid of them.

So even though it was cold, it was worth it because I needed to extricate her hate from my heart. And it makes me almost tear up sitting here because I know it won't be the last time I need to do that.