Two-way street

I'm standing in line at my local convenient store, located on Wrightsville Avenue. The surrounding area is a latent cultural reminder of this country's immigration "problem." At any given point you will see Hispanics, a race who is quickly increasing in numbers inside Americas working class environment. Of course there's the multitude of different visitors Caucasians, college students, farmers, toothless country folk, and affluent soccer moms. All recipients of differing warm hearted welcomes or the disheartening good-byes. It all depends on which category one most closely matched.

On this particular evening, while I was loosely grasping my time-heavy case of beer by my sweaty palm the line had made me restless. The line is long, it's a summer night. Hot. One of Wilmington's classic afternoon thunderstorm had just come and gone, leaving the air muggy. Most of us in the line are well aware of the areas constant summer climate for the long days here, and we're not comfortable with it.

However, at the front of the line a small family of Hispanics confidently breeze through the otherwise uncomfortable environmental scenario. They look familiar; I see the father there on my morning surf ventures as he heads of to his physical labor for the day. Always friendly.
They approach the register.

Because of my uneasy impatience I'm glaring at the new girl behind the counter. She had been watching the family with bias from the beginning. It was easy to predict her first dialect.

She's stinking bad of judgmental hate-her confidently ignorant smirk towards the gentlemen, staring at each of the family members.

"Uhmm... Where's your id?" She rudely couges.

"Great, a gosh darn pure bread southern racist," I quietly mutter to my roommate standing on the opposite side.

"What was that?" Her breathlessness is suddenly aimed towards me. I'm shocked that she heard me. Did this girl have a hearing possessed by the ominous ones? Conscious they're always being judged in a world slowly growing out of their "just" racialy-inequitable beliefs.

"I'm sorry, my mistake, I wasn't sure about a darn ethics class stance on atheist." Did I save myself? I hope I just made sense, man this could get ugly.

"Oh, alright then." She smiles assuredly.

Now her focus was elsewhere, she had forgotten about the green cards or whatever id my friend was in need of at the time. He purchased his own case of beer along with some treats for the little ones then preceded out of the store.

It was then I caught myself wondering how I just did that. Was it possible that this girl was so taken up by what I said that she just up and forgot to get this man's id. This wasn't a coincidence. I've seen this girl turn down my Hispanic convenient store acquaintances before for lack of proper identification, when they we're obviously well over the age of twenty one, and needed no proper identification.

This was odd to me and I had a brief moment of clarity, I was sure that the possibility of her ignorance could be persuaded to change. She might someday be able to break her own misunderstood beliefs about our neighbors of the south and support them instead of make the feel less welcome then they do during their day-to-day lives.

Ethically I feel like most of what we deal with during our day to day lives is decided in small incidents which bring to question our moral base-lines. This woman's behavior helped me reach my conclusion. It was disheartening at first, but as she slowed down because of my comment she seemed to forget about her misconstrued bias, just moving on without passing judgement.