I’m an open-minded person – or at least, I’ve always thought so. My ancestry is as mixed as an old American family gets: lots of Native American, some North English, some Welsh, even some African. I don’t give a rat’s who you fall in love with or how you worship God, or if you worship a god at all.

At least, I never did. I think maybe I do care now, at least a little.

My life is very different since September 11, 2001. My boyfriend at the time joined the U.S. Navy, and we married less than a year later. He and I and our children now live largely at the whim of the government. But this is wonderful in many ways, not least of which is the travel.

On the weekend before September 11 this year, we traveled to Niagara Falls, our last chance before being transferred away from the mainland. It was amazing, incredible, and inexpressible. But something disturbing happened.

There were three women traveling together who were wearing burqha. It got my attention, particularly the one wearing full burqha in which only the eyes are visible. It was cold enough that I was a little envious at times – they had to be warm!

I saw them near the falls, with their adorable children. I saw them on the paths and walkways. They kept to themselves.

At last, I saw them at the aquarium. I couldn’t help but see them. One pushed rudely past me, apparently taking her little boy to a different exhibit.

He was wearing camouflage sweats, and carrying a toy rifle.

I had a startlingly visceral reaction to that. A rifle? Who buys their little four-year-old son a toy rifle and lets them play with it in such a public place? We had toy guns when I was a kid, but my mother would have skinned us if we took it to, say, the grocery store. And that was thirty years ago.

Is it really good for children to encourage comfort with even toy weaponry in public? From what I know about psychology and desensitization, I have to say no. And I’m reasonably comfortable with guns.

I surreptitiously watched the kids pass the gun back and forth. It was clearly a favored plaything. I guess they were playing soldier, the little girl and the little boy. And I watched them weaving in and out between my kids and other kids of a dozen nationalities and skin colors, and I wondered what would happen in twenty years.

Are my kids going to be seen as prey? Are these two little Muslim children, beautiful as angels, going to be the murderers of my sons, or of the sons of other women?

How dare these women, mothers themselves, let their children bring weaponry – even toys – around other children? How dare they make the rest of us think about this? Make us see their beautiful children as potential murderers? Our own beautiful children as potential victims or soldiers, or the parents of victims?

The little girl, hearing her mother call, dropped the gun quite near me, under the tidal pool exhibit, and ran to the woman. My eleven-year-old son, blissfully unaware, stepped up to the exhibit, standing right in front of the gun. And the Muslim mother – the one in full burqha – hurried back into the room, clearly seeking the toy.

I knew perfectly well where it was. But I didn’t move. I made her look for it, past my son’s feet, and reach past him, murmuring something in her language as she did – excuse me? Stupid infidel child? I have no idea. But it bothered me that my son was no more than an obstruction to her. That earlier I had been no more than a thing to be brushed past.

I had observed all of them, children and mothers, as humans, as people who hide fascinating stories that I would love to hear. But by the time I left the aquarium, after several more negative encounters, I wanted nothing to do with them. The children – tragic. The mothers – a threat to my own children. All of them together – dangerous.

This is why we cannot solve our problem today. This is the issue. Both sides must reach out, must talk and understand, in order for peace to be achieved. But what I see is one side smiling with outstretched hand to shake, and the other side smiling and asking, “Will you submit?”

I will not.

I will never.

And sometimes, rarely, I wonder which side is which.

Though I don’t want to become less tolerant, less fascinated by other people, I will do what I must to protect my children and their free future. That, folks, is my number-one job, and the number-one job of every other mother in the world, whatever her politics or religion or nationality. I would kill to do it. I would die to do it. And, I admit, I would sacrifice the children of others to do it, horrible though that is. Can any mother say she would not?

Was I right in my reaction? I don’t know. I only know how I felt and how I feel. I am surely not the only one.

When I was a little girl, I thought – for some reason – that my father was normal. So he wore cowboy boots. That was okay because we were Southern and lived on a farm.

And he watched Gunsmoke. A lot. And John Wayne movies. Fine.

He always wore plaid shirts and blue jeans. He played with his cows in his free time, even though he really made money in construction. And he had a Colt revolver. And horses – ornery ones. And Western saddles. Still not too strange.

It wasn’t until the day I saw him decked out in chaps and sheepskin vest with a ten-gallon on his head and a whip at his side, headed out for roping practice on the horse he’d recently broke, that I realized: my daddy was Not Normal.

Like many his age, he’d been caught up in the cowboy mystique when he was young. Too much Howdy Doody and Red Ryder on television, too many singings of Happy Trails and Red River Valley, had affected his brain. He thought he was a cowboy.

My mother didn’t think very highly of it, particularly when he filled the gun rack in the hallway with Western rifles. A gunbelt hung casually on one side of it, each little slot filled with a bullet and the pistol weighting it all down; on the other side, two different hats and a whip increased the clutter factor, as did the brown leather chaps and the Western vest. Shotgun shells and bullets littered the shelf at the bottom, and little drawers were filled with gun-related implements. The whole thing must have been worth thousands of dollars.

Mom was sure my brothers and I would get into it. We just ignored it. We were used to my dad’s eccentricities.

And so I grew up watching him learn how to rope calves, then cows; seeing him train the dogs to herd so they could help him out; watching him ride around nosebleed cliffs to get to the newborn calves in the winter, when ice coated all the rocks.

When he started out, he was a wannabe. There’s no doubt. Chaps and a horse do not make you a cowboy.

A cowboy is made by being ground across the rocks and thistles of the wilderness – sometimes literally, when the horse tosses you. A cowboy is shaped and moulded through backbreaking labor in the still mists of morning, by delivering the breech calf in the dead of night. When you’ve broken ice around the dying baby calf, carried it into the barn with its lowing mother following, and lit the kerosene stove to warm it up and watch the life rise back up in it, that’s when you start being a cowboy.

I was never a cowgirl. Though it was me who held the bucket for the messy-mouthed babies to nurse from, I didn’t like it. I disdained the hard work in the sun. The horses didn’t like me much; one of them bit me on the shoulder when she first came to us, leaving a bruise that took a month to fade. And guns – forget about it!

But over the years, I watched my dad build his skills, growing better every day, keeping his cattle under control and selling them off for extra money. He bought more land for the farm he could barely afford at first. He sold off the tobacco base, focusing on having land to wander, and never allowed hunting for fear one of the damn slickers would shoot one of his animals instead of a deer. More than once, he ran off encroaching hunters. Men with two-shot deer rifles won’t cross an angry mounted cowboy with a gun and a whole bunch of bullets.

He doesn’t do that stuff any more. He did something stupid involving a non-filed sight, a loaded gun, and quick-draw practice, and I guess the hole in his foot soured him on the whole real-cowboy concept. But he still has the horses, though they’re aging and swaybacked, and every so often there’s a new baby calf to take care of.

But he’s always going to be a cowboy. He’s always going to have that thread of America running through him, the refusal to back down, the determination to succeed through hour upon hour of fruitless practice, willing life out of stony land and frozen baby calves.

A cowboy isn’t Gene Autry or even John Wayne. Most cowboys never got into a gunfight. But when you’re finding someone who defines who and what America is, that’s the cowboy: grit and determination and hard work and love for freedom and what you have. Being a cowboy isn’t about possessions or money. It’s about finding that toughness at your core, the moral structure, the work ethic, and growing that fibrous root into a cactus flower, prickly and remarkable. It’s about making the desert within us bloom. And it’s about just existing, being as much a part of the world around you as it is a part of you.

We need more cowboys.