What do you make of this Schwantz?


Have you ever seen someone being publicly harassed by haters? I hadn’t...before this week. Looks like I’ll have to get better prepared for dealing with it.

Thursday night after work I stopped to get gas at a busy intersection. Earlier in the day I had listened to an elderly Jewish woman whose family escaped the Holocaust when she was 6 years old tell me her fears about the election results, about how history seemed to be repeating itself. I had just finished a diary recalling Mom’s wisdom: “This, too, shall pass.” I pulled around to the open pump in front of a jacked-up big-wheel pick-up truck. As I swiped my debit card I heard yelling and saw a tall, skinny, hyped-up shaved-headed tattooed chain-bedecked shirtless young guy swaggering back to his truck where awaited another skinhead in the passenger seat. Oh, great. I turned away and started pumping gas, but the yelling intensified and had definitely taken on a threatening tone. I turned and looked again, and saw the tall skinhead now hurling invectives at a young brown man gassing up his beater Toyota across the way.

I moved to the back of my car, crossed my arms, and made eye contact with the young brown man, not sure what else to do but bear witness. I wanted to walk up to the two young tattooed chain-covered punks and scold them, but they seemed too out-of-control with rage and something else— Drugs? Alcohol? so I kept my distance but kept watching them, feeling helpless and somewhat cowardly. I didn’t want to get hurt. I am not a hero or a warrior. I didn’t want to escalate the situation.

The young brown man stood there impassively, watching the two thugs. I couldn’t make out the words they were screaming over their truck’s engine, but their intent was clear. The tall skinhead jumped back in his truck and gunned it, still yelling, and then spotted me, a 60 year-old professionally dressed white lady giving him the stink-eye. His truck suddenly lurched towards me and I thought, Well, there goes my car, as it looked like he was going to ram the back of it. As he narrowly swerved around my car he bellowed out the window at me:

“RAPE AND MURDER, BITCH! We’re free now, we can do anything we want! We’re free!”