Parrots--Gone to the Birds

Holland, Michigan isn't an area that caters to the young and fabulous. It is an extremely conservative, right-wing, religious community that circles around what's best for the family. They have had some pretty stringent rules in Holland such as stores and restaurants not being open on Sundays...even McDonald's. Those rules have relaxed a bit and you are free to eat all the fast food you want now on Sunday. But they still have some stringent rules regarding alcohol...like you can't buy it at all in Ottawa County on Sunday. Sunday's are for church. You also can't just open up a bar. You can't get a liquor license without having so many food to alcohol sales. Therefore most of the bars are restaurants.

There is one "bar" downtown--Parrots. It's been there for a long time. I'm not sure how it managed to get around all the rules and such but it did. Parrots serves mainly the Hope College crowd. Young, conservative, religious college goers that sneak out for a drink against the colleges rules of no alcohol.

Anyways, one night my husband, our friend Ben and I ventured to Parrots for a night out on the town...actually the weather was too nasty for us to drive elsewhere. It was my first time in Parrots and it will be my last time as well. The bar itself was nothing special. Dingy, smokey, with some pool tables and some local rock station; it felt like a drinkin' bar except that there were 4 other people in the bar and one of them was the bar-keep.

We took a seat at the bar on some stools. Ben took the stool closest the wall, my husband the next, which left me on the end with a bunch of stools open to my left.

Halfway through my cheap beer a young man sat down next to me. He proceeded to strick up a conversation (people do this to me frequently, I think because I look approachable). No biggy, I can handle a nice light-hearted conversation. But it went downhill from there. Before long this "boy" launched into something about supporting G.W.Bush in Iraq and recently enlisting because of it. Oh boy. This is not bar conversation! He then went on to tell me that "all Muslims were bad and we should bomb the hell out of them." Can you believe someone said that outloud? This quote has stuck in my head since that day.

I tried to reason with saying that there were "bad people" everywhere, all different colors, ethnicities and religions. That Christian extremists that bomb abortion clinics are bad too. That most Muslims are peaceful people, not war-mongering banshees like he was describing.

This kid didn't see it my way nor did he stop. He used every racial slur in the book. My husband and friend just looked on in amazement as I got more and more pissed off at the kid. They couldn't believe their ears either.

I flew the coop before I even finished my beer.

I still don't understand how someone can have so much hatred for people I'm sure he's had limited contact with. It's not like Holland, Michigan is a hot bed for middle-easterners. But this kid really hated these people.

Hatred seems to run deep with some people. It's like they never learned to love anyone who wasn't the same as them...and there fore everyone not like them is bad. I don't get it and wish it would stop.

Parrots is for the birds. I won't go back there. That experience has tainted how I look at that place forever. It will be forever be associated with the conversation that went wrong.