I ran into God four times last week.
I was in a small, street corner convenience store, the kind Spanish people call a “bodega.” I bought a can of Coca-Cola, the most American of beverages. The man politely took my money, and I noticed the small plastic crucifix on the wall, right next to the half pints of liquor.
A couple days later, I was in a liquor store, buying a six-pack of beer. The Indian people who run it had a small statue of some god or goddess behind the counter, next to the cigars. The god was blue in color, which means it is Vishnu. How did I know it was Vishnu? I asked the guy behind the counter. He seemed mildly surprised at the question.
I was in line at the dry cleaner, picking up my shirts. The guy in front of me, a portly fellow when viewed from behind, was wearing a yarmulke.
At the end of the week, I went to the drug store to pick up a prescription for my mother. The young girl who gave me the prescription was wearing a hijab, the headscarf some Muslim women wear.
I worked Sunday this week. I’m a newspaper reporter and I spent part of the day in a crushingly poor neighborhood, getting some resident reaction to a fatal stabbing that occurred the day before. One regular, non-hijab wearing, no blue gods American is alleged to have fatally knifed another of the same sort. The dispute was over a $50 debt.
Muslims have killed several thousand of my countrymen in this century, including the men and women who died when America foolishly sent its sons and daughters overseas because the rich guys needed some more death.
And I guess the girl in the hijab is capable of raising sons who will bomb the Boston Marathon. It’s happened.
I don’t know who raised the person who did the stabbing I was reporting on that Sunday. Probably almost no one. There’s an army of those folks around, violent with no ideology at all, killers without the hijab. They don’t make much of a crash in the killing department, hardly ever 3,000 a pop, but they grind away at the job slowly, killing one here, one there, killing each other, killing their girlfriends, killing their own children.
Today, I bought gas at a station owned by an immigrant from Syria. There’s God trouble in his country.
“The Muslims,” he said. “They’re not like Christians. They really practice their religion.”
He seemed to admire that trait. I suppose we all do in one way or another. True belief is always attractive because it’s so certain.
That’s what frightens us most about the killing in a poor neighborhood, the killing over $50. It has no good reason, no God, no political party, no uniform, no sect, no history, no anthem and no flag.
That kind of thing just doesn’t make any sense.
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist. Dion’s book, “Marc Dion: Volume I,” a collection of his best columns from 2014, is available for Nook and Kindle.