Used Cars and Terrorism with a side of Chutney

The biggest mistake I made last week was deciding to list my car on Craigslist when I had so much other stuff happening. I don’t even want to get into the details, but I listed it Sunday night and by Tuesday morning I had taken it down after being emailed, texted and called by about twenty people wanting to see it/haggle/ask a million questions. Monday was a terrible day, I was completely exhausted and felt hopeless by the end of it. It was really overwhelming, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I decided to wait until my dad was back from vacation so I could have him help me.

Tuesday morning I was still stressed out and exhausted about all the car stuff, but I was cheered up by going into Blue Shoe. Like I’ve said before, it really helps me with my perspective when I spend time there. Courtney, one of the artists, had a birthday coming up on the 15th, so we ate at the little diner across the street as an early birthday celebration. The staff there is really nice. They put a candle into her double cheeseburger when they brought it out. I spent most of the lunch being distracted by a good looking fellow at the booth across the room. He had a European accent (I wasn’t close enough to distinguish it), and he was eating across from two middle-aged women who I assume were work colleagues. Not the type of person you expect to see in a greasy spoon diner in Lancaster, Ohio. It made me even more excited about being in Europe soon.

After the artists went home at 3, I was loaded up with artwork and sent to the State Farm Insurance headquarters in Newark. They have a long corridor they’ve turned into an art gallery, and I helped hang a section with art from Blue Shoe. The Fire Claims department opened out from a doorway about midway down the corridor. I couldn’t help thinking about how State Farm was the insurance company my parents had used all through my childhood, up until the point when our house burned down in 2006. After the fire, State Farm dropped my parents like a hot potato. I really hate insurance companies.

When I got home Tuesday night, I started cooking and cleaning for a dinner party I had planned for the following evening. I have a couple of friends who recently moved to Lancaster and are expecting their first baby (a girl), and I thought they might like to meet a couple of my other friends who live around here and have two lovely little girls of their own. I have been craving good Indian food for a while, so I decided to try cooking an Indian meal. It ended up turning out really well and was a lot of fun, but Indian food is very labor intensive! I’m so glad that Nick and Tonya came over early and helped me cook; all three of us were cooking different things at the same time, while their daughters Chloe and Stella “helped” me with the Naan. Chris brought a pineapple and ginger banana bread which the kids really liked. The evening was really nice. I don’t usually have parties. I think one of the reasons is that I’ve always been sort of irrationally afraid that nobody will come. Apparently, this fear has been with me since  childhood...

This is a drawing I made when I was little. My grandmother kept it and put it into an album which she gave to me for Christmas a few years back (thanks for being awesome, Grandma!). As far as I know, this never actually happened.

The Indian recipes I chose called for lots of ingredients that can’t be found at any local grocery stores, so I had made a trip up to an international market in Columbus the weekend before. It was really fun going there, I was the only white person in the store. That doesn’t happen very often in Ohio. I overheard two of the young men that worked at the store talking about life in their respective countries (one was Middle Eastern while the other was from Africa). There was a really cute little boy running around by himself with a cart, very polite and bright-eyed. When I was leaving, I got to meet his little sisters. They were sitting in the car next to mine, and they waved and said hello to me, smiling. They were darling, with shimmery hijab in bright colors framing their little faces. 

I did a lot of driving that weekend, and consequently listened to a lot of NPR. Most of the coverage was about 9/11, and what people remembered from that day ten years earlier. It always makes me sad thinking about 9/11. It’s sad because people were killed in the attacks, but it’s also sad because I remember what I was thinking when the attacks happened. I was a senior in high school, and I was in post-secondary, so I was taking courses at OU. One of the courses I had enrolled in that quarter was a Political Science class called Current World Problems. It was a very interesting class to be taking in light of the events that happened. The class covered terrorism and U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, so we learned a lot about the background and history of the issues.

I remember, though, that on the day of September 11, as surreal as everything was, I had this feeling that none of it was a surprise. I had this feeling that maybe, just maybe, this could be an opportunity for us to take a serious look at our foreign policy, maybe consider some of the reasons why there are so many people out there who hate the United States enough to do something like this. It’s not that there’s anything we could do that would make everyone in the world love us, that there will ever be a time when nobody out there feels they have been wronged by us. Of course we can’t go back in time and change anything that has already been done. There will always be religious fanatics and nut cases who want to blow themselves and others up to prove a point. But I thought that at least we might consider the possibility that there are many people across the world who have perfectly legitimate reasons for disliking our government, that maybe we could look at the causes for this and think about how we could become more of a diplomatic, benevolent presence on the world stage.

Of course, that isn’t what happened. I think that, as is so often the case in world politics, the fear of the people was manipulated. It was used to justify everything from the invasion of Iraq to the invasion of our own civil liberties. It makes me think of F.D.R.’s first inaugural address, the line “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”... it’s a very potent idea for our current situation. A nation full of people living in fear can be so easily manipulated into agreeing to things that are antithetical to their own best interests, into giving up their rights and freedoms. When we turn on the news, all we hear about is how bad the economy is, how it’s not going to get any better, how there’s no way Republicans will ever pass Obama’s jobs bill, how our average household income has fallen... basically, it’s all about how scary things are, how afraid we should be. The only thing I can be sure of when I turn on the news is that it will be scary and depressing.

I think that perhaps the most revolutionary thing we can do as individuals is to refuse to be afraid. Or, more importantly, to refuse to let our fear be used to justify hate, war and destruction; to not allow ourselves to be scared into agreeing to sacrifice our rights or privacy. I think that the world would be a better place if we could all stand up and say, “No, you can’t scare me into giving this up or doing what you say”. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

Benjamin Franklin also said “to lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals” which I think is very sage advice for the people of the United States.