I woke up at 4:30 this morning to the sound of rain at the window, feeling like a buffalo had taken up residence in my throat. On a typical Saturday, I go for a nice, long, morning run; Today, I got up, fed the cat, coughed up a lung, and went back to bed.
This wasn't going to be an active day, so I ended up spending a lot of it in bed, reading. Reading a book that isn't for reference at work is a luxury I have practically no time to do these days, and I've been complaining that I take books out of the library and never find the time to sit down and read them. So, despite the sore throat, this was a welcome day. I took "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen," by Christopher McDougall, a book I've been meaning to read, out of the Peninsula Public Library the other day; I'd put a hold on it and it finally showed up, so I checked it out, hoping that I'd have a day coming up that I could devote to it. Today was that day, and I dove right into it.
The book, despite being just a year old, is worn. I mean, the physical book. It's been checked out a lot, I imagine, and it's a little soiled and the binding's seen better days. I noticed early on that someone had taken a pen to it, marking off passages in ink, scribbling numbers in white space, and I wondered what kind of moron marks up a library book. The answer to that came on page 75.
On that page, McDougall is in the midst of describing how an enterpreneur who brought some of the Mexican runners to an ultramarathon race insisted on being paid $20 to let someone have a picture taken with them. And in the margin, the previous reader of the book wrote this:
"Must be a Jew!"
Who the scribbler intended to be his audience, I don't know. I just didn't sign up for that.
Later in the book, several scribbles later, in fact, a passage discusses the evolution of man and makes a comparison between Neanderthals and the arrival of the first homo sapiens. And there, in the margin, read:
"Where did homos come from? San Francisco?"
I have no idea who wrote this, although I bet the library could figure it out by checking previous readers of the book and examining other books they've checked out. But it makes me just not want to deal with anyone in this area, ever. We know that the Peninsula is not exactly as diverse as other areas; it's mostly white Christian or Asian. Not too many Latinos (yes, there's an area of Los Angeles County where Spanish is not even the second language), very few African-Americans, and not a lot of Jews. I love living here, but sometimes it feels like an enclave in which we're not exactly welcome. I know, it's generalizing. I know, a lot of people here are perfectly tolerant and open-minded. But then I open a book and see those comments, and I wonder what they're really thinking. Is their default position that Jews are cheap bastards and gays are all from San Francisco and to be derided?
Maybe that's what they're thinking. But if there are people here, people educated enough to read a book that isn't filled with pictures and monosyllabic words, who are so uncomfortable with Jews and gays that they have to scribble insults in the margins of a library book, well, that says more about them than about the people they wish to, um, marginalize. And if they have the need to insult Jews, they should have the balls to do it to my face.
But that'll never happen. Casual anti-Semitism and racism and homophobia are easier when you don't have to answer for them.