I grew up in the panhandle of north Idaho where the mountains were wild, the people were small-town friendly and there were surprisingly very few potato fields.

It also happened to be the hotbed of a white supremacist group.

There’s a reason why they push the whole potato thing.

As the area was remote and predominantly white a group called the Aryan Nations had established a compound just a few miles north from my childhood home.

In celebration of their Caucasian-ness they liked to sponsor an annual parade on the main street of our town where they’d sport antisemitic signs and white supremacist flags. Being young, naive and very sheltered I understood nothing about racial prejudice or hate crimes. And since I liked parades I was irate when my parents told me I couldn’t go.

So my dad sat me down and gave me a little history lesson:

Which scared the living crap out of me.

As I’ve always found drawing to be cathartic I grabbed my bucket of chalk and headed out to the patio to do some emotional processing.

With tenacity and drive I set to work.

I even recruited the aid of my younger brother.

For hours we feverishly drew and colored until the patio was an extraordinary display of black and red.

I was proud of my artwork and didn’t understand why my mom freaked out when she came out to check on us.

Thirty seconds later I found myself armed with a scrub brush and soaked with warm soapy water.

Unfortunately, the black chalk proved to be significantly more resistant than the red, which somehow made the whole situation worse.

It probably didn’t help that my parents were supposed to host a patio party later that evening.

As you might expect I was grounded for the rest of my life and the backyard had to be quarantined until the harsh Idaho weather eventually scrubbed the patio clean.

It took about a year.

I learned a valuable lesson that day, though. I learned that if you ever do anything that could possibly be considered offensive you should do it in a subtle and sneaky way so your parents never find out.

I also learned that Nazis are pretty bad.