Sometimes a story is like an earworm, only going away after you've heard it. This thread brings up a story in my past, so please bear with me so I can let it go:

The weather was beautiful early in May when my twins were 3 (must have been 1986). I heard that there was to be a kite festival in Boston, I had the day off, and the 3 of us took off. Since driving and parking in Boston is difficult, I stopped at the end of the Blue Line at Wonderland in Revere and we went by public transportation. Franklin Park was easy enough to find, and we settled to fly kites before noon. It was magic! We were set up on a blanket on the grass and the crowd of families gradually grew behind us on the walkway. Food stalls opened and the air was full of kites. I bought a couple cheap kites and managed to get them both into the air (the idea was that each kid could have his own kite. Not a great idea - they just let me fly them.) Then a flyover by a vintage plane, and parachutes dropped out of the plane. Franklin Park is a golf course, so the landing area was about a half-mile away, over a slight hill. Harlan said "I'm going THERE!" and took off running. I immediately got tangled in the kite strings. After the few minutes it took to wrestle the kites down, I started looking for Harlan, first carefully searching the immediate area, then wider areas. It seemed an eternity. Finally, a woman came up to me and said "Are you Harlan's mother?" Yup. He'd missed the connection on the way back and merged into the crowd behind us. Turns out he wouldn't talk to adults, but this woman's 7 year old got him to talk. Her kid and mine took a tour of the festival, but couldn't find me. We reconnected in the line for the Police Bus, which was already full of lost kids. Whew! Life lesson learned, by both Harlan and me (and, of course, Virgil, the twin that stayed and saw it all).

So what does this have to do with the bus incident? Bear with me....

Sometime around the time the other mother recognized me, I looked around. Of course she knew we belonged together. We were the only white faces in that entire crowd. I have to explain that I have a problem with color blindness when it comes to "race." I grew up in a sleeper town for Lynn, Massachusetts. There were distinctions, of course, but as a kid it came down to whether you attended church school on Friday (were Catholic) or Sunday (Protestant). The major Liberal breakthrough of my childhood involved a Girl Scout troop where the Catholic girls were allowed to join a troop that met in a Protestant church. There was one family with dark skin. They went to Sunday school, and Debby was my friend. I went to college in Worcester, Mass., a city of maybe 200 ethnic neighborhoods. It seemed that everyone was prejudiced against someone, and half the time the reason was pretty obscure. I worked in a teaching hospital where most of the interns and residents were from other countries. Then I moved to Nashua, NH, where I caught an earful from my aunt about the French Canadians ("They're all inbred, and they don't believe in educating their children. They're all welfare bums!") The whole idea of making blanket statements about people from the way they look or talk or worship just doesn't seem worth my time, although an individual's personal history is important, of course.

So I got my kid back, we had lunch, and it was time to get back to the car before naptime meltdown happened. We climbed onto a city bus, heading back to the subway, settling into big seats at the back. The bus started off. A man about half-way to the front of the bus said something. I don't know what. I was paying attention to my kids and shuffling blankets and bags of stuff. Suddenly, the whole busload of people stood up. About half surrounded the man in front of us and started murmuring, then yelling. The other half turned to us and started apologizing! "We're not all like that! Don't listen to that ignorant person! You have a right to be here, too!" The guy got up and left at the next stop. I was a bit shocked and at the same time comforted that total strangers would defend me like that. I was also a bit frightened to realize I'd put myself (and my kids) in a place where we might need defending. I must admit we never went back there, although weather and work schedules were the stated reasons.

There could have been a stronger reaction around that woman in the youtube video. I'm sorry the whole thing happened. Maybe next time it'll be different, but I bet there'll be a next time. Thanks for listening (reading. ;-))