"Are you good?"

Been down in the dumps a lot this month...some of it due to things at my job and some of it because of things going on at the apartment building I live in (to say nothing of the crap still going on in Washington, DC).

Take this past Wednesday.

At about 2:10 PM (Central time), I was coming back from music practice at the church I go to, and was trying to hurry up and get out of said apartment building in order to rush out to my factory job when I saw three little boys (each roughly five to seven years old) sitting on the stairs inside the apartment building. 

I was heading up the stairs to my own apartment when one of the boys asked me: "Are you good?"

I told him: "Yes. I live here."

And as 5-23-2018 wore on and I was fighting to pack only high-quality products at that factory in Southwest Omaha, I got to thinking about something else that happened a month earlier.

One day back in April, as I was heading to my car to drive to work, another little boy was playing among the cars, SUVs, and trucks in the upper parking lot of the same apartment building.  

Out of the blue, that boy proclaimed to me: "I'm a police officer."

As if I needed to know that. 

As far as I'm concerned, the two incidents stemmed from just one thing:

The parents of the two boys taught them how to hate. 

That's all there is to it.

What hurts even more is that the boys and their folks come from lands such as Myanmar and Nepal...two of the nations Donald Trump labeled as "s***hole countries." (In recent years, the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area has built increasingly strong Karen and Nepalese communities...as well as increasingly strong Hispanic, Somali, and Sudanese ones.) 

And with television and this here Internet teaming up to give some of America's newest naturalized citizens (as well as lots of people who came into the world right here in these fifty states) a crash course on who to hang out with, it doesn't take long to learn bigotry.

I've lived in the same neighborhood since 3-29-1997...the very day I moved back here to the Big O after spending the previous eight years and nine months residing in Sioux City, Iowa.

All this time, I've seen the apartment building I've lived in since I moved back to Gabrielle Union's birth city turn from half-Black, half-White residency to predominantly Yellow. 

The building has changed hands twice, with the second sale having taken place this past February.

As long as I'm able to pay the rent, I've got a place to live. 

And I've got to admit the truth: Like the vast majority of human beings, I've tried my best to be good. When not at the factory or at church, I've tried to keep to myself and mind my own doggone business.

When it comes to that, I'm someplace between the middle of this long, long line and the very back of the line.

And I'm going to keep trying my best to be good...and be myself.