My Red Hat Society chapter did their annual thrift shop crawl this week, an event where they carpool to a sting of secondhand stores with a break in the middle for lunch. I’ve been on the go so much lately that I am burning out so I just met the group for lunch at a Mediterranean grill. The service was so slow I think I grew an inch long chin hair while waiting for my chicken shawarma. (I’m quite sure it wasn’t there when I left the house.) And if I’m being entirely honest here, I’m not fond of carpooling with other drivers my age and older. Once in a carpool, the driver was running on fumes---that point where your dashboard says you only have one mile to find a gas station. I’m too old for preventable stress, I get enough of the other kind. Another time the woman driving joked that her family wanted her to stop driving and I could see their point. Still another time the carpool driver hit a cement pillar in a parking garage. Car size is an issue with carpooling too. I recently learned I can’t fit a walker in my Chev Trax unless I put the back seat down. One problem with that: The back seat won’t go down without pulling the driver’s seat too far forward for me to get in and drive.
My problems are so first world, middle class that I feel guilty
writing about them, but it’s my life and I can’t write about someone else’s who
may be living with incurable diseases, violence in the streets, famines, water
shortages, in refugee camps, touched by natural disasters, etc., etc. I can empathize and
some might say my empathy runs too deep and that’s why it seems hollow to me when
we wear our colored ribbons of support and solidarity, hold candlelight vigils,
maybe donate some money then we go about our middle class lives believing we
did all that we could, effectively pushing our caring thoughts aside until
something else happens that primes the pump and spills our empathy all over the
place, muddying up our comfortable lives again. These days, we are getting
fewer and shorter periods in between those pressure-cooker-blew-its-top moments
around the world. And now we have the pressure cooker sitting on the stove in
Washington D.C.
Sitting with some friends recently the Trump tweet criticizing the mayor
of London was brought up and one lady was quick to announce that she is firmly
behind the president and all he wants to do and she saw nothing wrong with his
tweet. Shocked by that, I made a joke about looking for devil’s horns on the
top of her head because, I said, “I thought all Trump supporters had them.” She
laughed as I knew she would, but it didn’t lessen the tension in the air as another
woman made an anti-Trump remark. Since I was the one who brought up the tweet---I
honestly thought the five of us were all democrats---I felt it was my responsibility to
avert a heated conversation. I took out my imaginary pen and notebook and announced
that we should make a list of topics we shouldn’t talk about. “Shall we put
politics at the top?” I asked and several others at the table quickly agreed. “How
about religion and money?” I joked, the three Victorian no-no topics of
conversations in mixed company. The Victorians meant ‘mixed’ as in men and
women but in this decade, in this country mixed company is quickly getting
redefined as politically mixed.
I’m beginning to wonder if politely avoiding these kinds of
conversations among friends and family isn’t a mistake. Maybe by not talking it
out with people we otherwise like and respect aren’t we encouraging the
polarization that is driving our country off the cliff? It’s easy to visualize
devil’s horns on no-name strangers but not so easy when we know and like
someone. How can we ever understand where each other is coming from if we don’t
listen to one another? I was brought up to find a way to lessen tensions that
come up, not encourage them, so I’m a fish out of water to do anything
different than what I described above. But as the British statesman, John
Morley, once said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.”
So maybe people like me who try to avert or avoid potential confrontations are
just as guilty of intolerance as the people who shout others down into
submission. We each get the same results: We are silencing the voices of people
who don’t have a carbon copy view of our own. The danger in that is, of course,
we are eroding a fundamental building block of democracy, of civilized societies---our ability to compromise
and build a consensus at all levels of human interaction---as messy, annoying, maddening,
exhilarating and wonderful as that process is. ©
“Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism,
for
it permits us to assume superiority without personally boasting.”
Sidney J. Harris
