Fun With Bigots
As most of you may know, I am a pale, pink-ish person. This sometimes causes other pinkish persons to see me as their allies in some fatuous battle against brownish persons. Honestly, I will pretty much always side with "those people" when "those people" are lumped together as a homogeneous, inhuman mass. Mostly I'm too sissy to speak up, but yesterday as I was waiting for the bus, someone else started the conversation. A corpse-white woman in an odious pink Red Sox hat, who I'd never met before, was standing next to me. Two shortish, brownish people who often share the bus with me joined the mob from the other side.*
Woman, apparently to me: Those people! They come into our country, they don't even know how to stand in line!
Me: [affronted silence]
Woman: Ugh!
Me, doing my best Bela Lugosi impression:** Those people, live in this town their whole lives. I come from Moldova. I know how to queue. "Those people," pah.
Woman: Oh I'm so sorry I...
Me: [Sneer, silently board bus to sit near brownish persons]
*Note for those not from the Boston area: Bostonians do not really have a rigid grasp of queueing to wait for the bus. They'll kind of wait in a longish lump that is mostly like a queue, but the etiquette is not exact, and people routinely join the scrum at whatever point is convenient.
**Not actually very good.
Woman, apparently to me: Those people! They come into our country, they don't even know how to stand in line!
Me: [affronted silence]
Woman: Ugh!
Me, doing my best Bela Lugosi impression:** Those people, live in this town their whole lives. I come from Moldova. I know how to queue. "Those people," pah.
Woman: Oh I'm so sorry I...
Me: [Sneer, silently board bus to sit near brownish persons]
*Note for those not from the Boston area: Bostonians do not really have a rigid grasp of queueing to wait for the bus. They'll kind of wait in a longish lump that is mostly like a queue, but the etiquette is not exact, and people routinely join the scrum at whatever point is convenient.
**Not actually very good.