Fear

Recently there was a shooting in Knoxville, TN at a Unitarian Universalist Church. The guy that did it wrote in a manifesto of sorts that he was motivated by his hatred of liberals. I am sure you have all heard about it.

Things like this are why I am always paranoid of being openly liberal in the South. I have heard stories of people being beat up and harassed for their beliefs, and now we have a mass shooting.

I wanted to bring that up as a preface to a recent event that occurred to my husband and I. For the first time in my life, I had a gun pointed at me. Here is how I ended up at the wrong end of a handgun:

I went to Alabama to visit my family for the 4th of July. I had only been there a couple of days when I noticed there was some friction in the neighborhood. The neighbors down the hill from my sister and her husband seemed to have some problem with them. The first incident I witnessed was the day they called to police on my sister because her dogs went near their land and supposedly seemed threatening. We all knew it was bull, and the cop seemed to be annoyed that he was bothered by such a trivial thing. Oh well, the neighbors are unfriendly assholes, no biggie. It's not like we have never had those neighbors before. So, we went on with our business.

This brings us to the 4th of July. It was getting late that night and there were fireworks going off in the neighborhood, like every year (although it is technically illegal within city limits.) Then, I started to hear something weird. It sounded like fireworks hitting the roof of the house. My husband and I went out to investigate. When we went out back we saw the first firecracker hit a pecan tree in my parent's yard. Then, we saw the the second (one of the big ones) go off at ground level in my sister's backyard only feet from her backdoor. It lit the entire backyard up. We saw that the people down the hill were aiming fireworks at my sister's house. We ran over there to tell them to stop. That is when we had a gun pulled on us.

The wife is the one who pulled out a handgun. The male just stood there and said "get off my land", although we were on my father's land. My husband was the first to notice the handgun pointed at him. He said that having a gun pointed at him made him uncomfortable and asked if she would kindly put it away. That is when she went all right wing nutso on us, saying, "it's my right to carry a gun, you can't take my rights away." Seriously, she said that. So, we stood there longer than most people would have if there was a gun pointed at them and continued to ask them to be careful where they are pointing their fireworks. After we left, they packed everything up and went inside.

Anyway, you might wonder how this story ties into the above story. Well, it turns out that the animosity towards my sister started when she got a Wiccan bumper sticker on her car. She dared to be openly Wiccan. These people were simply following the trend of expressing fear of what is different in the form of hatred and violence. As a result, I had a gun pointed at me on the 4th of July.

A few days after the incident the woman gun toter came to my dad and apologized for "the gun thing". She claimed that the reason she pulled a gun on us was that she was afraid for her husband's life. See, he was in Iraq and now has a pin in his back and she thought we were going to hurt him and she said that they had accidentally shot all those firecrackers at our houses. Yeah right. Why was her first response to pull a gun on her neighbors if they were innocently shooting fireworks and accidentally shot some at our houses?

Of course, they are patriotic, gun loving, Christian, conservative Americans. And that gives them the right to pull guns on their neighbors because they thought that they were above the law and common decency since he was injured in Iraq. I said that night that I was done. I disown Alabama and the South in general.