A Fighter.

A story of change.

    Did you know that, in 1964, a girl had been murdered on the street while thirty-eight bystanders witnessed it happen? Her name was Catherine Genovese, and she was killed on the way back to her apartment. Nobody actually saw her getting murdered, but they did hear her yelling things like “Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!”
    Nobody went out to help her. Nobody called the police. They just let him kill her. He attacked her three different times before she finally died.
    When I heard about this case, it opened my eyes up to the fact that humans could be so indifferent to the wellbeing of others. Not just with murder, but with the injustice that happens to others. A lot of people don’t fight for what they believe in simply because it does not affect them. When I found out about this case, it made me wonder about myself; would I be one of the people that sat inside their apartment that did nothing?

***

    I like to think of myself as a fighter. When I say that, I don’t mean that I like to go up to people and start fights with them. No, I mean that I like to fight for what I believe in. I have a blog on the internet where I talk about my views on everything, such as religion, racism, abortion, gay marriage, hate crimes and the burning of the Quran. I know that a lot of people might fight back the things that I have to say, but I say them nonetheless. I will not just sit there and let the things I don’t agree with happen without a fight. I haven’t always been like this, though.

***

    We were all sitting at a table inside of an Irish-themed restaurant. I don’t remember the name of the place, but that’s probably because of the lack of sleep that I had received from the night before. Not wanting to let summer die easily, I had decided to throw a party at my house and pull an all-nighter. From there, my friend Emily and I decided that it would be fun to drive up to Grand Rapids at eleven in the morning. Why? That’s a good question.
    So there we were, along with my friends Gabe, Jason, Derek, Kayla and two other girls I didn’t know that decided to tag along. It was just a normal day in our world with normal chicken ceasar wraps and normal jokes. Normal, that is, until I saw the group standing outside the window.
    Dressed in all black, they were standing at the entrance of a Polish festival, holding a sign that said “White Pride Worldwide.”
    I wasn’t tired anymore. It’s hard to be tired when you’ve just had a shock with the force of defibrillators applied to your system.
    “No way,” I said, and then repeated. “No way.”
    Sitting in front of me, Emily turned around to look at what I was staring at. “What?”

*A brief note on my friends*
Derek and Gabe are gay and dating.
Emily is gay.
The two other girls are gay and dating.
Jason is gay AND black.

White Supremacists hate both.

***

    I didn’t really form my own opinion on others until the seventh grade. My friend Ashley, who had been my best friend since the second grade, had recently come out as a lesbian. Until that point, I didn’t really know anybody that was gay and I didn’t know what to thing of them, so finding this out helped me realize at a young age that gay people aren’t different from us at all. They make like a different gender, but that doesn’t mean that they act differently or do things differently than the rest of the world. We started hanging out with more and more gay people and I had become completely accepting of the gay community.
    The same thing happened to me with race. I went to a school that was heavily mixed with all different types of races and I hung out in a group that was just as blended. I learned from an early age that gender, race, religion or sexuality is not who you are; it’s just one fact about you mixed in with all of the other things that make you who you are. To classify or discriminate against an individual because of any of these things is completely ridiculous and ignorant.

***

    When we walked out of the restaurant, I noticed that the “White Supremacists” had stopped holding up the sign and were now walking around the street and placing flyers on car windshields. For some reason that I can not explain, I started to feel anger rising up inside of me. I walked up to one of the cars and ripped the flyer off of the windshield.
    It was something about their friend in jail and how they were trying to raise up an effort to get him out of jail. At the bottom of the letter, it said that he was sentenced for life for “Protecting the white homeland.”
    Protecting the white homeland, huh? I can only imagine what that would mean when he got a life sentence.
    You don’t get a life sentence for beating a man up. Some people don’t even get life for murdering somebody.
     My anger had been replaced by fury. How can such ignorance exist in this world?

***

    I started watching this show called “What Would You Do?” In this show, they stage scenarios right in front of innocent bystanders to see how they would react or if they would do anything. They had staged scenarios such as pilots getting drunk before flying, waiters telling gay couples that they can’t eat here and customers making fun of mentally challenged grocery baggers. For the most part, the bystanders would sit there and do nothing, but there would always be that one bystander that would step in and do something about it. I remember how much I would admire the strangers that did something and how much I would think of them as a hero. Then I would find myself hoping that I would be just like them if I was in their situation. I liked to hope so, but I felt that I would never be certain of that until I was in that person’s shoes.

***

    I had to do something. I couldn’t let this message of hatred be spread around. Apparently Derek was thinking the same thing, because I noticed him start walking to the cars.
    “What’s he doing?” I asked Emily.
    Emily shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think he might be doing something about it.”
    I started running. Passing Derek, I ran up to the nearest car and ripped the flyer off of the car. Looking at Derek, I ripped the flyer to pieces and threw it in the garbage. Turning around, I proceeded to the next car.
    Then the next car.
    Then the next.
    After a while, Derek caught up to me. “You know how you were wondering about if you would be that person on What Would You Do?” he asked.
    I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. “Yeah?”
    “Well,” he said. “Now you know.”
    Smiling, I turned around and continued on ripping the flyers off of the cars. After a while, I noticed that others had seen what we were doing and had come to investigate. When we told them what we were doing, some of them even joined in. Some just walked away, but a few stayed and helped us clean up the cars.
    After we had taken care of all of the flyers in the city, I noticed a car driving by us down the road. The passenger window rolled down and one of the members of the “White Pride” group stuck his smug face out the window.
    “So, I see that you’ve taken all of our flyers, huh?” he said.
    I didn’t say anything to him. I just smiled, just as confident as he was.
    Even when the car had passed and some of my friends were worried that they would come back and do something to us, I kept on walking with that same smug smile on my face. I couldn’t get over what I had just done. I had just stood up for what I believe in even in the face of the enemy. I had become the neighbor that would have called or helped Catherine. I had become the bystander that would have done something. I had become a fighter.

Author's Note

An essay that I wrote for my English course that I thought I would share with everyone.

Reviews

[donny ingraham]

very touching, you truly possess the passion for the pen. thank you for sharing this story. it really sounds like a day in life. Gender issuses are slowly becoming are of the past, but as for those that fight to end them, the fight never ends