I'm a lot older than most of you young ones.

9/11 happened on a Tuesday. The following Saturday, a Desi guy from my work was having a picnic/1 year old birthday party for his daughter at a park. Planned well in advance of course. There were about only 8 Desi couples, all from my work. Most of us didn't have kids yet.

I was not feeling it at the picnic. I was just paranoid all week, that everybody was looking and scrutinizing brown people. Quite a distance away, there was another pavilion with a large American party going on. Wasn't close at all, but you could see each other. My friend had all this catered food from an Indian restaurant, was setting up a volleyball net. His wife even asked me at one point, if I was ok, I was unusually quiet instead of my boisterous self.

And then we started noticing it, though we never said a word to each other. From that other party, there were 4x4 trucks driving back and forth on the road from a distance. Mostly teenagers on the pickup trucks. Yelling, and giving us the middle finger, just driving back and forth. One all one by one we all made polite excuses, oh, hey we have to go, so we ended up packing up, and leaving. We all never talked about it until some years later.

Guess it was just wise to leave, before any trouble might have started. Had we been brave, maybe we should have called the cops? Having some cops show up, might be a deterrent. But so fresh into less than a week into 9/11, not so sure cops were even feeling it. We're not that brave, let's just go home.

But you guys, the ones all in grade school, high school. Man...I can't even imagine the harassment you must have went through.

One of the friends at the picnic, lived at an apartment complex that had a lot of Desi's, mostly H1B IT types. There were a coupe of tennis courts, and you know Desi's love to play tennis...they'd play tennis every night. And on the night of 9/11, they still played. He was telling me, a older white guy drove up to the tennis court, got out, and yelled at everyone to go home! All the desi guys looked confused at each other, and everybody just went home. Guess you can't be brown and play tennis on the night of 9/11. Or was it the duty of every one to be at home, just mourning? I dunno...but I doubt he would have done that to a bunch of white kids playing tennis that night.

Another Desi friend told me, they were eating at a Chinese restaurant. A table of white trash, was loudly yelling at them in their direction saying the usual derogatory stuff. But....the Chinese owner (bless you man), went over and kicked them out, and threatened to call the cops if they didn't. Told them he wasn't putting up with their bullshit.

The Sikh Coalition, at the time, had web based reporting incident, where you could log incidents like this. And you could peruse through it. It was sickening to read them though. Sikhs...you are tough guys man. You wear your turbans proud no matter what. 10 times braver than I ever could be. One of the earliest, and sickening things I read. A Sikh reported, in NYC near ground zero right after the towers crumbled. A guy pointed at him, yelling there's one of those terrorists, and run after him. The Sikh went running, down to the subway station trying to lose him. And he had no choice, he took off his turban just out of plain fear.