The circuitry we’re calling the “creep meter” has been shorted out by many decades of CDIC Cognitive Cissonance Immersion Conditioning.

You’ve been lectured, exhorted, shouted at, sneered at, spit on, lied to, and generally made to feel like a damned soul for feeling threatened by the approach of an ethnic person if you are a DIFFERENT ethnicity. This makes you IGNORE your own mis-givings about an approaching figure on a dark street.

Don’t want anyone to be able to accuse you of stereotyping or EVILEVILEVIL racial profiling.

There can’t be much comfort for a victim of an actual mugging in being able to say “Well, I never thought ill of the person until the knife blade actually pierced my flesh.”

There’s a self-defense movement aimed at encouraging women to “pay attention to their mis-givings about a developing situation, or an approaching person of the contrarywise gender. The developer of this self-defense scheme reminds readers and viewers that we have developed our defensive “radar” over many thousands of generations, and we should trust it and choose to protect ourselves and put distance between us and any threat. We have no obligation to other persons to let them approach us to “striking distance” out of any sense of political correctness, etc.

I recall wandering around Greenwich Village with a college friend in the early 1970′s. It was near midnight, but it was a brightly lit street, with a number of people standing around outside clubs and bars, conversing and strolling. I spotted a couple of ladies I recognized as regulars on Sesame Street (hey! I’m an animator!) and dragged my friend over toward them.

They saw us – two long-haired freaky types – approaching, and one said to the other, “Uh-oh, we’re about to get mugged.”

I immediately stopped in my tracks and told them “No, we were just going to ask for your autographs!”

They laughed, and gave us the signatures, all smiles.

Then we mugged them.