10.07.01
Dorothy is a client that comes in to Carol twice a week to have her hair washed and set.
"Hey, did you tell Carol about the Taliban people?" she asked her husband, Gene.
"What Taliban people?" Carol asked.
I think we were all focused in on the conversation, wondering if some sort of news had broken that we hadn't heard yet.
"Not yet," was his answer.
The gist of the conversation that followed was that Dorothy and Gene had been at lunch, where they witnessed some shifty-looking (read: Middle Eastern-looking) 'Arabs' who were probably in the Taliban because they were definitely too old to be students, and they didn't have any business being in this town speaking their Arab language in a restaurant. Plus, they were being shifty (talking in another language), and if she'd seen a cop, she would have turned them in. Since there was an absence of police around, she made sure to study them closely, so that she could call America's Most Wanted if she saw their pictures up there.
Never mind the fact that they were most likely doctors or engineering grad students, probably not even of the correct genetic extraction to be considered 'Arab', which isn't the most polite term anyways, and most certainly weren't Taliban.
That's about as accurate as them being Klan members because they're white bigots. I'm sure Dorothy and Gene would be terribly insulted if I called them KKK supporters to their face, yet don't even blink at referring to some random guys as shifty Taliban Arabs.
And I couldn't say anything to them about it because -- and I'm completely serious -- Carol would have murdered me for getting in Dorothy's face and suggesting that she's a disgusting racist. Instead I apologized profusely to my client, and then told Carol later that I was really upset by what Dorothy had said, and that my client was offended as well.
She just shrugged.
But that's what I expect from her.
