Fighting back against burning of social contract

I was shopping in a Spokane Valley warehouse store today. While shopping the stacks of clothing, a young Latino male and his Latina girlfriend, both tall, attractive and well-dressed, smirked in my direction for some reason. Typical young adult smirk. Independent of race and ethnicity.

And me, sporting my usual hunter-not-gatherer shopper countenance, shot a glare at them, irrespective of their ethnicity, I’d have done it to someone as blonde and blue eyed as me. Usually I’m ignored or smirked at harder.

But they did something so sad, so unexpected and so wrong it caught my breath. They looked downwards with these looks of fear, guilt and concern. Like they were in trouble. They weren’t in trouble. And I thought, don’t be afraid. It’s just me with my cranky shopper face. I’m on your side.

Whatever the social contract we Americans had with each other, well that contract is beginning to burn at the edges and it’s going to keep burning and this nation could become as horrible, as dark, as deadly, as any caliphate ever imagined by ISIS.

We have to fight back against this. We have to try. We’re America, dammit.

Robert Salsbury

Spokane Valley