This piece by Blog-Bud Alison will do your hard flinty conservative heart much good, assuming you have such a heart. That said, you should still go read if you have one of those famous hearts that bleed, for there's an object lesson there specifically for YOU. Just to whet your appetite...
Eventually a group of extremely well spoken young women came in. Polished looking. Chatting away. They rather apologetically asked me if I would mind if they shared my table. The seating means you all become best buddies in a heart beat whether you want to or not. Of course I didn’t mind since that was the nature of this little place and assumed the chatter would be low key and banal given our collective circumstances. I hadn’t bargained at all on them discussing in suddenly super obnoxious tones who they had voted for in the ongoing Labour leader elections. As Party members. And why. One of them was American. She listened and questioned her friends about the leadership contest. This went on for some time and for most of it I managed to escape into my food or click on my iphone and text or email friends. Anything to avoid being by default pulled right into the heart of their politics with no way of escape.
...
I’m sick to death of the assumption in political conversation that everyone these days is a leftist and that right of centre must simply shut up and speak in hushed embarrassed tones or accept Left is the only polite political conversation to be had out loud these days. So that was my opening shot. “Ok I’ve had enough” I addressed them quietly, smiling.
You said "knickers...brief-ly."
ReplyDeleteSettle down, Beavis.
I seriously considered adding a parenthetical "heh" or "ahem." But I figured my literate readership would geddit. You didn't disappoint. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI love the word knickers. Even the spelling of it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link Buck. Glad you enjoyed. It was a cathartic 5 minutes of quiet finger pointing on my part in that cafe. Weirdly.
One point that never seems to get made with these things, and I believe it's because we're not open to accepting it -- is this:
ReplyDeleteOnce the opposition gets into the territory of "you're just a bad person," there isn't any way to keep the conversation civil except by changing it.
And The Left has been living in that little corner of the room ever since the Florida debacle of 2000, if not before. I'm not going to excuse some of the rudeness we see on the right, it does exist there. But it has no effect on anything when the discussion is pre-deteriorated with The Left's tried-and-true tactic of "think what I think or I shall presume the worst of your character and tell everyone I know to do the same."
To use an Air Force analogy, injecting further rudeness into the exchange would be like stalling an airplane engine after the wings have already fallen off.
Alison: I love the word, as well. And it's made it into the American vernacular... as in "don't get your knickers in a twist." Granted, the origin of the phrase is decidedly British, but we've adopted it for our own.
ReplyDeleteThat said... your piece was definitely the BEST thing I read today, and for many a previous day, as well.
And The Left has been living in that little corner of the room ever since the Florida debacle of 2000, if not before.
MOST definitely before, Morgan. That's the primary reason I left the Left in the way-back, i.e., back in 1980 or thereabouts. I was sick to death of the sanctimonious posturing, to distill the thought. They've not changed in the intervening 30 years -- they've only gotten worse.
So true Morgan.
ReplyDeleteIt was a great read! Alison did what many of us want to do when faced with a similar situation.
ReplyDeleteMy tongue is permanently pockmarked with tiny bites - from me keeping my peace.
Tis jealous I am of Alison on this one!!!
I wish I had said that. The knickers threw me.
ReplyDeleteKris: I don't have much occasion to hear the Liberal side of things in person these days. But I rarely held my tongue in the past... you should have been a fly on the wall for some of the workplace political conversations I had out in SFO. I was one of only TWO conservatives in the company... literally. We had three, but one quit.
ReplyDeleteLou: The knickers threw you?