this just in
by Debra Kamin

an encounter with a bigot

The first time, I drove around for hours before I saw it. I went to CostCo. To Robinson’s May. To Starbucks. It was a Saturday wasted on errands, but the windows were down and I was singing to the radio. I was feeling good, enjoying the sunshine, until the light caught my windshield just so. And there, going south on the 805, I saw it.

The second time, I was more prepared. It was night this time, and my car had been parked on the dark street for hours. Three blocks away, I could hear the Pacific crashing onto shore—it was foggy, and would probably storm soon. The windshield was soaked in condensation as I started the ignition. I saw it immediately, backlit in the glow of a streetlight.

In these places, at these times, a girl just doesn’t expect a swastika to show up on her car.

I live among hippies in the crunchy-organic enclave of Ocean Beach. We are part of sunsoaked, laid-back San Diego, the third-largest metropolis of Blue State California, in the freely democratic United States. I never saw it coming.

I probably should have photographed it, called the police and reported a hate crime. Maybe I should have knocked on doors, asking my friendly, laundry-detergent-sharing neighbors if anyone had noticed an Anti-Semite on the property.

Hi, I’m Debra, I live in Apartment C across the way. That’s right, I lent you a cup of flour a few months back. Yes, well, sorry to bother you, but I was wondering…have you seen any Neo-Nazis lately?

Hi Bill, I hope my music wasn’t too loud last weekend. This is kind of a strange question, but do you know if any Skinheads have moved into our apartment recently?

Hi Mrs. Gunn. That smells delicious—baking cookies again? Oh no, thank you, I’m on a diet. But I was wondering…have you happened to witness any racist or pro-Aryan acts in the past few days?

Yeah, like that would have worked.

What disturbed me so deeply about the incident wasn’t the swastika itself, which had been traced by an index finder in the windshield’s ocean residue and the next day appeared, like a constellation, in the dried water droplets on the glass. The strangely symmetric figure, an equilateral cross with arms bent at all four angles, would be lovely were it not for its horrific connotations. In fact, long before it was hijacked by the National Socialist German Workers Party, the swastika was a symbol of luck and good fortune in many religions around the world. Ironic, yes?

According to Wikipedia, the origin of the word swastika is the Sanskrit svastika, which means an object or mark associated with good luck. In Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, it is a sacred symbol. Chinese, Korean and Japanese art has long made use of the swastika as part of a repeating pattern. Archeologists found several swastikas in the ruins of ancient Troy, and excavations of Native American relics in the Ohio Valley, not far from where I was raised, revealed extensive use of what would become the symbol of the Nazi party.

The four lines emanating from a center point have been associated with the four cardinal directions, conjuring associations with the Sun and the rotation of the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere.

The great British author Rudyard Kipling, a man heavily influenced by culture of India, used a swastika to personalize the dust jackets of his books until the rise of the Nazis. In his Just So Stories, which I read and reread to the point of memorization as a little girl, the tale “The Crab that Played With the Sea” features a stone bearing a “magic mark,” originally illustrated by Kipling himself as a swastika.

No, the swastika is not scary. It’s the people who draw it, who hear that an openly Jewish woman lives nearby and take note of her car and her daily schedule, who are.

Perhaps this is why my reaction was not of anger or fear, but of sadness. My car was defaced with a vicious image, yes, but in the most cowardly and ephemeral way. This graffiti artist, whoever he is, does not mean to actually harm me—he wishes only to scare me, shake me up and force me to watch my back.

While one flick of my windshield wipers obliterated his handiwork, my perpetrator is afflicted by a permanent and inescapable to hatred. It must bog him down, an obsession that blinds him to all that is good and sweet in this life.

And what a pity that is.

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