This
Journal

October
1999

Fear the stranger.

We must be hardwired for this. That reaction, when we have it, leaps across several hundred millenia from the earliest days of Us when the world was quite possibly more dangerous than it is today, when personal or species-wide extinction lurked just over the next hill. A very useful adaptation. Those who feared the stranger survived - over and over again.

Anyone who has walked or driven city streets at night knows the impulse firsthand. Last week, while I was waiting for Erin out front of the Riv, a dirty old fellow with a glassy gaze floated toward me. I avoided his eyes and walked off to the side. He moved straight on to the next folks. Later that night, driving west on Lawrence towards the expressway, I stopped at a light behind another car and noticed a group of young Asian men hanging out by the side of a building. I automatically began to plot an escape strategy for when or if they approached. (I remember how I hated when my parents would lock the car doors as we passed through certain, always black, neighborhoods.) A few minutes later at another light I wondered about the life of this scruffy man struggling with a shopping cart piled high with bulging gray shapes that contained, no doubt, all of his stuff.

Are you a lion or a lamb?
Are you as guilty as I am?

This comes to me over my boombox from a band named Low. Yes, there are lions and lambs, predators and prey. But there is also guilt. I doubt that the lion feels much guilt for munching on the lamb. Yet this lamb feels a twinge of guilt and shame for suspecting that these strangers are hungry lions. Such an unfounded assumption can only serve to cut me off from sources of potential enrichment. At what point does this primal fear no longer serve our best interests?

The myth of The Suburb is Prince Prospero's dream. Have you read "The Masque of The Red Death"? The prince will keep the sickness outside his castle walls. He will hold all joy and beauty within. But a rude intruder, The Red Death, who has probably been inside all along, brings the whole party to a fatal conclusion. People have tried to feel safe in suburbs and elsewhere by excluding the stranger, the different ones. How perverse that, as recent sensational events unfold, we come to find that dangerous stranger in our neighbor and our own children. Withdrawal and exclusion may not be the best response to Stranger Danger. What's that old line? "We have met the enemy and he is us."

One year ago today we were reacting to news that a young gay college student had been brutally beaten and left for dead. And he did die, one year ago tomorrow. What shocked me then was not just that Mattthew Shepard looked like he could have been one of my students, but that the young men who killed him could also have spent time in my classroom. I am concerned that the anti-gay language that so casually peppers adolescent discourse lies like scum on the surface of a much deeper well of potential violence. Dehumanizing language loiters how many steps away from dehumanizing action?

Any of us are strange enough to be strangers, different enough to be shunned.

What do we do when the stranger we fear is already inside the castle? The Prince attacked with drawn dagger and fell dead. I wonder what would have happened if he'd offered the masked figure a danish and some coffee instead

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Hebrews 13:2.