Glurg?
So I found this treasure at the local Goodwill; a Clinton/Gore '96 campaign T-shirt. And I decided I had to have it. Honestly, when would I ever find another shirt like that? So I wheedled my mum into buying it for me (I was broke, thanks to the Delirious concert--more on that when I get my pictures uploaded). On the way out, the saleslady said, quietly, "I wish I'd seen that. I'd have bought it." and the guy behind me in line said "They'll run you out of town, you know." On the way out of the store, I blithely told my mum that a car with a Kerry/Edwards sticker had been vandalized at my cousins' Christian school. She looked a little worried, but didn't say much.
Not thinking that I would actually incur bodily harm, I decided to wear it to work today. (The shirt, not the Kerry/Edwards car.) My coworker euphemistically warned me that I'd get some interesting conversations started, but I still didn't take the hint, and blithely went aboot my day. I got a couple of comments and a weird look or two, but no real conversation.
Then this retired regular came in and commented, saying he was a Democrat but that we were a dying breed. We chatted for a bit and then he sat down to drink his coffee.
A few minutes later another regular, in his forties, came in and noticed the shirt. He said, rather shortly, "Clinton/Gore. Does that mean you're anti-Bush?"
Not really wanting to start a strop, I said, "Well, I don't like the way the country's being run at the moment."
Defensively, he said "Well, what's wrong with it?"
As he's sort of a deadpan guy, I still couldn't tell whether he was serious or not. "Where do you want me to start? We torture people--"
"Torture! Right." He started going on about how evil the Arabs were, and how they just want to see us all dead. "And they have blood on their hands!" was the line I recall.
"And we don't?"
That made him angry, and he fell back into the traditional, unforgiveable rhetoric--"You don't have your facts straight! You just listen to the mainstream media! Why don't you actually sit down and think about this for a minute?"
This to the person who looks up all the sources she possibly can from all feasible facets, who has the curse of the middle child and sees everyone's point, who always looks for alternatives to a false dichotomy, who lies awake at night deliberating and angsting and crying and overthinking everything ad nauseam, who never stops questioning herself. This to the person for whom learning to think for herself was a complicated, incredibly difficult journey through seven years of childhood cult-mentality conditioning and eight of grade-school desperation for any possible way to fit in (which she never found, thankfully), and who as a result holds so tightly to the new-found freedom that she tries never to stop thinking for herself, to the point of almost never finding anything solid enough to settle on.
At this point the Democrat came over, and the two of them got into a virtual shouting match in my lobby, which ended with the Republican leaving in a huff and the Democrat following him, and then screeching tires and the Democrat returning to apologize.
How do people get so caught up in themselves that they start believing that anyone who disagrees with them must be of some sort of less intelligent form of life? ::puzzled:: And I possibly shouldn't wear the shirt to work anymore, as I really don't want to chase people away or start all-out brawls, and one of my favourite things about the coffee shop is its neutrality--people bring their stuff in and take it out again with them, and it's a safe place to just express and be without someone yelling at you, so I probably shouldn't have tried to upset that by wearing the shirt while being the spokesperson for the business.
...But still.
(Then, of course, there was the fellow who got my address from some website and emailed me to say "Excuse me, there are enough hypocrites out there; don't call yourself a Christian, dyke." Except with worse grammar. But we don't take him seriously.)
Then later I got hit on by a cute girl, which was totally self-esteem +10. :D And then we had a great long nicely civil conversation about religion, specifically paganism and Christianity, and what happens to both of those (and others) when people go wooky and fundamentalist, and such.
...and she totally thought I was cute. self esteem +more XD
Not thinking that I would actually incur bodily harm, I decided to wear it to work today. (The shirt, not the Kerry/Edwards car.) My coworker euphemistically warned me that I'd get some interesting conversations started, but I still didn't take the hint, and blithely went aboot my day. I got a couple of comments and a weird look or two, but no real conversation.
Then this retired regular came in and commented, saying he was a Democrat but that we were a dying breed. We chatted for a bit and then he sat down to drink his coffee.
A few minutes later another regular, in his forties, came in and noticed the shirt. He said, rather shortly, "Clinton/Gore. Does that mean you're anti-Bush?"
Not really wanting to start a strop, I said, "Well, I don't like the way the country's being run at the moment."
Defensively, he said "Well, what's wrong with it?"
As he's sort of a deadpan guy, I still couldn't tell whether he was serious or not. "Where do you want me to start? We torture people--"
"Torture! Right." He started going on about how evil the Arabs were, and how they just want to see us all dead. "And they have blood on their hands!" was the line I recall.
"And we don't?"
That made him angry, and he fell back into the traditional, unforgiveable rhetoric--"You don't have your facts straight! You just listen to the mainstream media! Why don't you actually sit down and think about this for a minute?"
This to the person who looks up all the sources she possibly can from all feasible facets, who has the curse of the middle child and sees everyone's point, who always looks for alternatives to a false dichotomy, who lies awake at night deliberating and angsting and crying and overthinking everything ad nauseam, who never stops questioning herself. This to the person for whom learning to think for herself was a complicated, incredibly difficult journey through seven years of childhood cult-mentality conditioning and eight of grade-school desperation for any possible way to fit in (which she never found, thankfully), and who as a result holds so tightly to the new-found freedom that she tries never to stop thinking for herself, to the point of almost never finding anything solid enough to settle on.
At this point the Democrat came over, and the two of them got into a virtual shouting match in my lobby, which ended with the Republican leaving in a huff and the Democrat following him, and then screeching tires and the Democrat returning to apologize.
How do people get so caught up in themselves that they start believing that anyone who disagrees with them must be of some sort of less intelligent form of life? ::puzzled:: And I possibly shouldn't wear the shirt to work anymore, as I really don't want to chase people away or start all-out brawls, and one of my favourite things about the coffee shop is its neutrality--people bring their stuff in and take it out again with them, and it's a safe place to just express and be without someone yelling at you, so I probably shouldn't have tried to upset that by wearing the shirt while being the spokesperson for the business.
...But still.
(Then, of course, there was the fellow who got my address from some website and emailed me to say "Excuse me, there are enough hypocrites out there; don't call yourself a Christian, dyke." Except with worse grammar. But we don't take him seriously.)
Then later I got hit on by a cute girl, which was totally self-esteem +10. :D And then we had a great long nicely civil conversation about religion, specifically paganism and Christianity, and what happens to both of those (and others) when people go wooky and fundamentalist, and such.
...and she totally thought I was cute. self esteem +more XD