Anger

 I’m a liberal guy. I believe in free speech, even free speech that I find offensive. So I was surprised yesterday when I saw something. My reaction was immediate visceral anger. I’m still struggling to understand what the person was trying to communicate beyond their racism and ignorance. We were traveling yesterday and I did not see this in the town where we live. I will say we were in rural west central Illinois going through one of the many small towns that is almost exclusively white. Maybe when you are raised without any meaningful contact with people of other ethnic backgrounds you end up ignorant of the impact of your communication. We moved here recently from an urban area in the south. We saw and interacted with folks from other races, religions and sexual preferences practically daily. Maybe that impacted my reaction. Here is what I saw. You decide how you see it and what it says to you.