An eye for an eye...

August 20, 2013

…leaves the whole world blind. That’s what Gandhi said, and this statement adorns the bumper on the back of my 2005 Subaru Forester. The only bumper sticker I have ever affixed to a car.

Today in the parking lot of my local supermarket, as I wheeled my grocery-laden cart up to the Subaru, a woman pulled up next to my car and asked me, “Where did you get that bumper sticker?” I told her that I had bought it at Kimberton Whole Foods. She began to pour out her story to me – she lived with people who were angry, who wanted revenge, who had different values than she did. The Girl Scouts, her brother, her parents – all people who caused her great disquiet of the mind. Her brother had held a gun to her head, she told me; he was angry because she, a single parent, had moved back home with her parents.  The Girl Scouts wanted to expel a 12-year-old who thought she might be bisexual; her daughter did not think this was right and did not understand why the Girl Scouts wanted this. The woman did not want her daughter to grow up thinking the way the Girl Scout leaders were thinking. She wanted the bumper sticker as a statement to these people, so that even if she did not say anything to them, it would show them how she felt. She wanted to be able to look at it and remind herself that tolerance, kindness, forgiveness were the values that she honored, no matter how vengeful and judgmental those around her were.

She spoke for about ten minutes, her words tumbling and circling around her, and I listened. After she had finished her tale, she thanked me for making her day, and drove on.