I Was Extremely Embarrassed
An unanticipated challenge of running a website full of arguments is figuring out what to post at Christmas. After all, in the season of cheer and goodwill, the last thing I want to do is talk about the most unreasonable people among us.
Thankfully, many of the people old enough to be commenting on the internet have figured out how to be reasonable. Even if they had to learn through experience.
In my article, We Need To Talk About Our Slavery Fetish, I mentioned former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, whose racism was immortalised in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.
But for Nin, the story reminded him of a different Alabama resident:
Nin:
I dislike Alabama for many regional issues as I live in Tennessee. Mostly it's good hearted fun because of the Crimson Tide. But in 2006 I witnessed an event that angered and embarrassed me. I was travelling through northern AL at night with my first wife and small kids. We needed a bottle of water to mix formula for the youngest.
We had driven a while and finally found an open store about 10pm. I went in, got the water and stood in line behind an elderly gentleman. The cashier, a young 20-something white guy, stops ringing him up and yells at him to get out of the way and told me to move up. I said he was here first and the cashier said "he can wait". I was extremely embarrassed and told the gentleman I was sorry, but I need to feed my toddler. He said to feed him and not worry about it. 15 years later I still worry about it. I told my wife what happened. We never went joy riding in AL after that.
Steve QJ:
I was extremely embarrassed and told the gentleman I was sorry, but I need to feed my toddler.
😅 Seriously? This is the depth of your resolve? It didn't occur to you to say to the cashier that they needed to show some respect, and wait the 2 minutes it would have taken to finish ringing up the old man?
Ignoring crappy behaviour or feeling "embarrassed" by it doesn't change it. I appreciate that you wanted to feed your child, but I think s/he would have survived the extra 2 minutes required to take a very small stand for what's right.
Sorry, I guess this wasn't the response you were expecting, and I wasn't there. Maybe it all seemed very different in person. But as you've told it here, you don't come off as the good guy in this encounter.
Nin:
No, I realize my response should have been more direct when the cashier blew off my initial statement. That moment was transformative to me, and I will never live it down, which is why I'm still embarrassed about it. But it also reminds me to do better when it would be easier not to. But that leads me research and study and read and understand the truth of how we got here and what it takes to get out of it. I don't have all the answers, but I know fanning the flames isn't it.
Steve QJ:
That moment was transformative to me, and I will never live it down, which is why I'm still embarrassed about it.
Ah, well in that case, good for you. We all fall short sometimes. My objection was that it didn't appear that you'd learned from it. Glad to see I was wrong.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I’m never happier to be wrong than when somebody turns out to be better than I assumed them to be.
There’s so much moralising and finger-pointing in today’s social justice movements. People are expected to be perfect first time, every time. And if they ever fall short (even in a tweet from ten years ago), they never get a second chance.
But to my mind, this exchange with Nin is exactly what creating a better world is about. It’s about speaking up in the moments where you could stay quiet. It’s about having doing what’s right even when it’s inconvenient. It’s about standing up for the old man in the store.
And when we fail to meet these standards, as we inevitably will, it’s about learning from our mistakes.
Most of us aren’t politicians or community leaders or the CEOs of multinational corporations. Most of us don’t have the time for the resources to be full-time activists. Most of us can’t single-handedly change the world. But each of us, every day, has the opportunity to nudge the world in the direction we want it to go. We can be kinder to those around us and encourage others to do the same.
Just imagine if we all did.
Thank you for reading everyone!
This is the last edition of The Commentary for 2021. Wishing you a happy, health and wholesome holiday season. And I’ll see you in the New Year, with more heartwarming, humorous, and headache-inducing conversations.
Good to end on a positive note. Happy holidays and new year to you!
I had a similar experience when I was traveling through the deep south in the late 60s, and I’m afraid I behaved as badly as this fellow traveling through Alabama. I was riding a bus that had a stewardess on it. she had a full uniform with the bus company‘s logo on it, and she served beverages and food when requested. That’s a pretty weird story right there, but my part in it involved my complicity with racism. I’d been sitting next to a black guy in an army uniform about my age, and we had been having a reasonably pleasant conversation. The stewardess came up to me and asked me if I would like to change my seat so I would be sitting next to a much older white woman. I had no desire to do this, because the black guy was good company, and certainly better company than this old white woman. But I was easily intimidated, and just meekly moved, leaving the black guy to stare self consciously out the window for the rest of the trip.
it would’ve been so easy to have stood up to that stewardess. The traveler through Alabama had a much better excuse than I did. That young white guy could have gotten violent, and this might have endangered the old man as much as it endangered our traveler. but I was dealing with a petite woman, and it was years after the civil rights bill had passed. I could’ve said “thank you for your concern, but this gentleman and I are having a very pleasant conversation and we would like to continue it.” but I still didn’t do it. I let an obviously racist act slide by, and I said nothing and did nothing.
to make things more complicated, The young black guy had spent some time saying how much he liked the ass on the stewardess, and how much he wanted to fuck her. I didn’t join in for that part of the conversation, but I didn’t call him out on it either. maybe she was trying to separate us because she overheard that conversation, and didn’t want to hear anymore of it. But I think her real motivation was racism.