Three Arab-Americans from Utah have been kicked off a flight from Minneapolis because the other passengers refused to fly with them.

I had a long post about this, but it’s been eaten twice, so I’ll shorten it up for the third try. Also, it’s not the sort of post that will get a lot of love, because I know I’ll say something in here that someone will take poorly. So be it.

In Denver, when someone says something about the mid-west, they mean Ohio or Illinois. That’s not what I mean when I say it: Minnesota, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska… think of an area vaguely in the middle of the U.S. where you have no desire to go, ever, and it’s probably the mid-west.

This news bit doesn’t surprise me, because it happened in the mid-west. LAX would have surprised me, as would Miami, Denver, Chicago. Any number of other locations (except Texas), but not Minneapolis.

Let me tell you about the mid-west.

First, I know many well-adjusted, educated, culturally-aware people who live in this region (I daresay if you’re from there, and reading this, you’re one of them), but any one of these folks will tell you that it is hard to find someone in that area to really talk to, to discuss cultural events with, who “gets” them, who is - frankly - not ignorant of the rest of the world. If you find such a person, you MARRY them, or if marriage isn’t appropriate, you get them on your softball team, because they are unusual and special.

Moving on. There’s a psychiatric term called dissociation, which is basically a defense mechanism in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated out and moved away from you. So, if something bothers you, or makes you uncomfortable, or ellicits emotions you don’t like, you use dissociation to (not) deal with it. If you don’t want to deal with changes in culture, or with certain types of people, you dissociate. Some places are more conducive to this type of behavior than others.

In the mid-west, you’re soaking in it.

Racial discrimination flourishes in this sort of environment: people ignorant of the world outside their area, and those who seek to distance themselves from that world. Let me use my grandmother as an example. Bless her heart, she is a good person who harbors no hard words in her, but she never used another word for “a black man” except “nigger”, until my sister married Reggie, and she realized she needed to expand her vocabulary.

Of course, she never had to say nigger, because “there aren’t any niggers around”. It’s easy to be well-adjusted when everyone is WHITE.

More? Bring up an Indian Reservation in casual conversation: most people will sound like a scared yuppie from a big city talking about the Projects.

Bigotry, come of ignorance. Also, they are scared right now, like the rest of us.

So, a plane full of ignorant, frightened mid-westerners kept a trio of Americans of Arabic decent from GOING HOME. It makes me mad. It makes me pity the people who felt that fear and who didn’t understand. It makes me angry with the people on that plane who knew better and said NOTHING. I want to throw things, write angry things in my blog. I want to yell.

I want to make it not have happened. I want to believe we are all better than that, and that we’re going to rise above this, and that the attacks won’t divide us.

But I don’t.