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highlyeccentricOnce, when I was about fifteen, a woman with a flourishing moustache came into the shop that I worked in. Seriously, this thing was luxuriant. I know men who couldn't grow the like.
After she'd left, my co-workers were expostulating about its repulsiveness, wondering how the owner of such a moustach could bear to walk around in public sporting it, and asserting that they should have recommended to the woman a good brand of hair removal cream.
Absentmindedly slopping my mop over the floor, I remarked that 'She must be really happy with herself...'
My older co-workers stared at me. I pointed out that it must take a lot of confidence in yourself to walk around with a moustache like that.
Finally someone spluttered that I always had to think the best of everyone, didn't I? And life in the bakery went back to normal.
Call me naive, but the overwhelming majority of the time, that's true of me. As far as I'm concerned, conservatives are good people with some wrong-headed ideas. College kids I can be dismissive of, but only because I am one... And when it comes to it, every time I meet a new college person, I work on the assumption that they're one of the many non-morons I'm sure must be in the college system somewhere... Often I'm wrong, but sometimes (like last night)I'm delighted to be right. If you ask me, someone who knows they have a prejudice and who's actively working past it is more to be admired than the happy left-winger who thinks they have none.
I complain about my friends' and family's foibles. The partner of a friend of mine will only eat 'ancient foods' because of her blood type. I whinge about otherwise intelligent people who believe 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' and similar crap. I splutter about the sort of people who'd recommend Wild At Heart to teenage boys.1 Several whole branches of my family are inutterable bogans. But they're my friends, my family, and they're good people. The fact that they have a few stupid, aggravating, or plain out intolerant foibles doesn't erase that.
It perplexes and confuses me when I have to deal with people who have the opposite standpoint, the sort of people who immediately assume that most of humanity are stupid and intolerant and otherwise evil. It's perplexing and confusing when we come up with opposite impressions about people, groups or situations to which we're both new. But it hurts and confuses me when it's my friends, my family, my college, my co-religionists who are being so maligned.
Praps I'm just silly. But thinking about this today, I realised- I don't have to try, to think well of the rest of humanity. Nobody has to prove their worth to me. That's my basic outlook on life, and it's a trait I really value in those around me as well.
~
1. And why are they using the interlace from the Lindisfarne Gospels (or is it Kells?) on their webpage, anyway?
After she'd left, my co-workers were expostulating about its repulsiveness, wondering how the owner of such a moustach could bear to walk around in public sporting it, and asserting that they should have recommended to the woman a good brand of hair removal cream.
Absentmindedly slopping my mop over the floor, I remarked that 'She must be really happy with herself...'
My older co-workers stared at me. I pointed out that it must take a lot of confidence in yourself to walk around with a moustache like that.
Finally someone spluttered that I always had to think the best of everyone, didn't I? And life in the bakery went back to normal.
Call me naive, but the overwhelming majority of the time, that's true of me. As far as I'm concerned, conservatives are good people with some wrong-headed ideas. College kids I can be dismissive of, but only because I am one... And when it comes to it, every time I meet a new college person, I work on the assumption that they're one of the many non-morons I'm sure must be in the college system somewhere... Often I'm wrong, but sometimes (like last night)I'm delighted to be right. If you ask me, someone who knows they have a prejudice and who's actively working past it is more to be admired than the happy left-winger who thinks they have none.
I complain about my friends' and family's foibles. The partner of a friend of mine will only eat 'ancient foods' because of her blood type. I whinge about otherwise intelligent people who believe 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' and similar crap. I splutter about the sort of people who'd recommend Wild At Heart to teenage boys.1 Several whole branches of my family are inutterable bogans. But they're my friends, my family, and they're good people. The fact that they have a few stupid, aggravating, or plain out intolerant foibles doesn't erase that.
It perplexes and confuses me when I have to deal with people who have the opposite standpoint, the sort of people who immediately assume that most of humanity are stupid and intolerant and otherwise evil. It's perplexing and confusing when we come up with opposite impressions about people, groups or situations to which we're both new. But it hurts and confuses me when it's my friends, my family, my college, my co-religionists who are being so maligned.
Praps I'm just silly. But thinking about this today, I realised- I don't have to try, to think well of the rest of humanity. Nobody has to prove their worth to me. That's my basic outlook on life, and it's a trait I really value in those around me as well.
~
1. And why are they using the interlace from the Lindisfarne Gospels (or is it Kells?) on their webpage, anyway?