And sometimes, dogs hate the Amish.

There was this one time, when I lived in Ohio, that I had this little black dog with a curly tail. Actually, it wasn’t one time, I had her for a long time, until she went to live with my ex. I tell you this so you don’t think she’s gone on to the Happy Hunting Grounds- she’s pitting her now-geriatric 17 lbs against whatever dangerous animals she can find in the American West these days, and happy and healthy as of my last update, which was a couple months ago.

So anyway, this dog, Bailey, that I had when I lived in Amish country. She didn’t like the Amish. (No, it wasn’t even a little bit embarrassing. Why do you ask?) She would suddenly start acting deranged- baring her teeth, snarling, and spinning around in circles, for no apparent reason. This was very different from her usual, over-excited-but-cheerful behavior, and the first few times it happened, we were shocked to see the puppy acting more like something out of a horror movie than a family pet. Then an Amish buggy would turn into the street and she would get even more irrational.

Eventually, we realized that even the sight of an Amish family walking in the distance was enough to set her off. It’s not completely unheard of- I’ve known of dogs who couldn’t be around people in hats or men with beards, for instance. But usually they only react when their triggers are visible, and nearby. What’s interesting about Bailey is that she was identifying her theoretical opponents based on something we people cannot detect- from as much as a mile away, no less. We had her from the time she was six months old. And before that another family who had gotten her from another family. The Amish, by definition, live separately from “the English,” so whatever contact our dog may or may not have had with the Amish happened before the family who gave her to us adopted her. Whatever she was reacting to was impressed on her in the first three months of her life. Based on something nearly subliminal, she formed an implacable fear and loathing that she acted on, without thinking, for life. Well, until she left Amish country, anyway.

Did I happen to leave a point lying around somewhere, you ask? Well, a bit. Obviously, humans are not dogs, and people who get confused on this point tend to get into trouble. But we people like dogs because we see ourselves in them a little- or see what we would like to be.

So my little point is this: things happen to us and we react to them throughout our lives. And sometimes, we don’t realize that we are doing that, because the actual memory we are reacting to is so far back that we haven’t seen it in a long, long time. But we keep reacting anyway, in much the same way a smell can surprise us by bringing back a vivid memory we thought was long gone. Hold onto that point, because I’m going to circle back around to it in a minute.

With absolutely no segue at all, I’m going to move onto the topic of Ferguson, MO. I don’t have to tell you what’s been happening there, but I will tell you that I really haven’t said anything about it. Not online, not in real life. Almost nothing. Not because I don’t have any thoughts or opinions, but because there is a lot of hard, unhappy stuff to think about before you even get to saying anything. And also because I’ve seen that a great many people could improve this conversation by being quiet and listening. And because I am privileged to have a choice, and I’m choosing not to talk about it. But I’m going to say this: we live in a world where parents feel they have to teach this to their children:

and that’s no good. That’s no good at all.

And now I’m going to circle back to that little point I made up there. If there was a magic wand that would fix this once and forevermore, we wouldn’t be here in 2014. If we could erase bad things by not talking about them, then we wouldn’t have expressions like “dirty little secret” or “skeleton in the closet” or “swept under the rug.” If we’re going to bring about a loving a peaceful world, we need to shine a light on all the ways we are being Bailey, who hates the Amish for no discernible reason. We need to do it to ourselves, and for ourselves. It’s easy to look around for someone to blame. It’s hard to point that finger back at ourselves.

Nobody is able to examine all their assumptions and take apart all the underpinnings of what they think, feel, and believe because we’d come to our knees. Commerce would stop. The Apocalypse would no doubt begin and the end of the world as we know it would swiftly follow. (You can prepare for that.) But when something terrible happens, we have an opportunity to open ourselves up a little. To look at something awful and depressing and to realize that our neighbors and friends live a different reality than ours, and to ask ourselves: “Do I even know why I react this way?”

Maybe you know the answer. Maybe you won’t ever know. But it can’t hurt. Maybe we can stop repeating some of our behaviors, before we teach them to our children, to be repeated some more. Let’s try it.