Ignorance is bliss

My brother and I have said that ignorance is bliss hundreds of times over the years. We meant that once you know the difference between 500 thread count bed linen and percale you can no longer be happy with cheap sheets. Once you know better it is time to take stock of the linen closet and make room for improvement. The cliché speaks volumes about being happy not knowing what you don’t know.
Ignorance has many faces. One of them bares my likeness. I come by it honestly; my linen closet is stocked with clients and friends that adore diversity. Folded into and insulated within my well stocked linen closet of bliss it was easy to forget that hate is alive.
Eight years ago I bought my house. I set about landscaping and transplanting daylilies the first week. As I moved a huge tuft of lilies across the yard a young boy rode by on a bike and yelled “Hey FAGGOT your corn is getting stuck in my ass!” My reaction was; he thinks these lilies are corn. Who plants corn in the front yard? Oh wait, he called me a fag!
Just last week, we overheard one of the white valets say to the other “That black guy had that ‘gigolo’ music so loud…” We think he meant a bigoted word not meaning a man-hooker. As we drove away we recognized how ignorance and bigotry reveal themselves simultaneously and that we said nothing.
Our second haunt that same night produced another breed of hate. As I spoke to my friends a man behind me was, I’m told, mocking me and gesturing with bent wrists. I’m told he was saying “I’m gay, I’m so gay” to his group. Our elbows brushed, I glanced toward the nudge and not knowing the man or what he’d been doing, I asked “Can I help you?” “No, I’m good” he said and walked away.
My friends thought I was confronting the man with my question. As they told me what I missed each of us admitted to hearing bigoted remarks and saying nothing. That too is ignorant. I could have yelled at the boy years ago “They’re hemerocallis kallos lilies, the other species you got right!” It’s so hard to know what to say that conveys both messages, your comment was offensive and you’re an ‘asphalt’.
It is too often we ignore ignorance. I think it requires more than an accidental confrontation. To say nothing only perpetuates their bliss. This requires a deliberate statement that speaks to ignorance in an effort to educate one cheap sheet at a time.