tempted by jonny
	Lately I’ve been eating a lot of peanut M&Ms. I mean, a lot of peanut M&Ms. Troy keeps buying gigantic bags so that we can eat all of them in one sitting while watching re-runs of “The Gilmore Girls.” That’s another thing. I’m watching a lot of that show lately. It’s kind of taking over my life, and this is also my husband’s fault. He took my innocent hobby and turned it into a slightly unhealthy obsession, forcing us to watch all the seasons on DVD. The show and the M&Ms combo are a temptation I’m trying to resist, mainly because I fear we will both end up 100 pounds heavier. But my tempter of a husband is completely giving into it. Every time we go to the store he tosses a bag into our cart while moving his eyebrows up and down seductively. I yell at him and say we must stop eating like this. An hour later we’re sitting in front of the TV happily devouring a bowlful of M&Ms. And then we feel sick and promise ourselves we will stop. I think we may be close to finally thinking about seriously cutting back. Then there’s the more serious kind of temptation. The Ten Commandments kind. The “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” stuff. I don’t struggle with wanting to kill people or cheat on my spouse or steal things, so I’m pretty distanced from all of that. It’s easy for me to smile at my cute little obsessions with candy and TV and be shocked and outraged by the rapists, killers, terrorists and child abusers. Now those folks are evil. Those folks have real problems with sin and temptation. Not sweet little me. Actually, serious temptation is an everyday occurrence for sweet litle me. While it may not involve murder or adultery, it’s a whole lot more destructive than M&Ms and those witty Gilmore girls. I have a shameful tendency to make snap judgments about people. My main target is Dominican teenage boys in my neighborhood. I see them coming and immediately think they’re up to no good. I am tempted to give up on them. After all, they’re disrespectful, not so smart and probably won’t amount to much. Plus their pants are falling off. The other day I was walking down the street and saw a tough gang of these 14 year olds coming toward me. I averted my eyes, fearful they were going to say something mean to me, when I realized that one of them had stopped to help an elderly woman who was trying to get down some stairs with her push cart. I of course passed this very same woman and didn’t consider that she might need assistance because I was too busy brooding on those frightening hoodlums. Some sweet little thing I turned out to be. Then again, about five minutes after writing that heartwarming story, a friend came by to tell us her cell phone had just been stolen, out of her hand, while she was talking on it, by one of these disrespectful, not so smart, pants-falling-down kids. Another friend, who happens to be pregnant, had her iPod stolen in the subway recently by a similar good for nothing gang. Makes a person nervous. Makes a person want to leave their electronics at home. Makes a person feel a little racist. As progressive and wonderful as I think I am, sometimes I think horribly racist thoughts about young Dominican males. Like so much of New York City, my neighborhood is a melting pot of many different cultures. A whole lot of my neighbors are from the Dominican Republic, and many of them are my friends. We go to the same church, play at the same parks, shop at the same stores. I know their passion and their sense of humor and their amazing cooking and their love for God and each other and for me and my family. They think of my baby as theirs, and they speak to him in Spanish hoping that we will finally learn it. I know and love these people. And yet I walk down the street and am tempted to think that these young men, sons and brothers of many of my friends, are worth less than my fancy iPod or cell phone. Now there’s some evil for you. Most of us are outraged right now over the devastation in the Gulf Coast, and we should be. There is a feeling in the air that many Americans see poor black people as less valuable than non-poor black people. Do I see urban Dominican teenagers as less valuable than middle class white teenagers? Do I see Spanish speaking people as less intelligent than English speaking people? God, I hope not. I once heard something interesting about temptation. To resist it wholeheartedly is to understand sin all the more. If you take shelter from the wind, you don’t really know how powerful it is. But if you stand there in the wind and brace yourself, fighting against it, you understand it. I’m standing in my neighborhood, and it is far away from the white middle class street I grew up on in Salina, Kansas. There we all looked alike and spoke the same language. I was the norm. Now I’m the minority where I live. Sometimes I feel the strong wind of racism, and I want to resist it. The majority of children I know are boys, and most of them are Dominican. They are tough, passionate and very close to becoming teenagers. Soon they will wear baggy clothing and strut as they walk, making me very uncomfortable. At that point I can chalk them up to being no good anymore, letting my compassion off the hook. This would be the safe thing to do, because it means I wouldn’t have to be part of their lives. When I give into the temptation to see these boys as bad, I don’t have to care about them. Whereas if I resist that temptation and stand there in the hurricane, I get wet and messy and hurt. I also get community and friendship and love that I didn’t have before. I wonder what those kids think when they see me walking by with my suspicious face and judging eyes? They’ve probably got me figured out. Some of it might be true, but most of it probably isn’t. After all, every single one of us is so more than what we look like. Don’t be tempted to think otherwise.