My wife recently had an experience that says volumes about how horrible our political discourse has become. At the same time, it was a testament to the generosity of total strangers. My wife and I live in the Washington, DC metro area (Arlington, Virginia more precisely). This means we have access to a culturally diverse population, as well as one of the more historic areas to visit.
Last week my wife had the misfortune of losing her wallet while visiting a Hair Salon in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in DC to the North of downtown. Like anyone we briefly searched for the wallet before giving up and contacting her credit card companies to cancel all of her credit cards. We assumed the $120 in her wallet and all of her Credit Cards were permanently lost.
Even if the person, who found the wallet didn’t steal the credit Cards, we weren’t taking chances. Lo and behold she got a call from her bank telling her that a stranger had found her wallet, called them and wanted to return it to her. We guess that the good Samaritan had found it on the street, though we were not sure whether it had been disposed of and found or the person had merely picked up the wallet where it dropped. The fact that the woman who found it had called the bank was a good sign that the credit cards had not been lost.
My wife was ecstatic. Though we had cancelled the credit cards, there were also other items in the wallet that were valuable to my wife. So, she contacted the woman to arrange a meeting so that she could obtain the wallet.
Friday comes and my wife had bought her a small gift as a thank you for being such a good Samaritan. Turns out the woman was Syrian working at one of the Middle Eastern embassy's (to protect her privacy I won’t say which one).
Everything was in the wallet, including the $100 bill that my wife's mother had given her as a gift for Christmas (She hadn’t had a chance to spend it). That in itself was not so surprising. Most often good Samaritans don’t clean out your wallet before returning it. It really depends where she found it--after someone else had cleaned it out and disposed of it or not long after it had been dropped.
Anyway she gave the woman a small gift and was not entirely surprised when the woman reassured her it wasn’t necessary because her faith teaches her that she should not expect a reward for good deeds. We know that not everyone is a good Samaritan for the gifts they might receive. What was shocking, however, was she followed that up with the following totally unsolicited request:
Earnestly she said, “you can do me a favor. Please tell all of your friends that not all Muslims are terrorists.”
My wife could only manage a shocked “of course.” Later, when she told me the story, she said she wished she had said more, but was so shocked by the request that she just didn’t know what to say. Neither she nor I have ever believed that all Muslim are terrorists, anymore than all Christians, Buddhists or Hindus are terrorists. But it bothered both of us that a Muslim Syrian woman living in the US felt the need to make such a request unprompted and unsolicited.
Thank you for that Republicans, especially you Donald Drumpf, for that bit of American xenophobic humiliation! You may cynically claim you’re the least bigoted person the media has ever met and you wail about the injustice of PC attitudes, but this is what you have wrought . . . after committing an act of kindness and generosity, a woman requests that we not think ill of her entire religion, because of the hatred you and your party spews on a regular basis.