rednecks and liberals
I moved to a new place, three hours away about five months ago. This last weekend my wife and I went back to celebrate our daughters birthday. While there we hooked up with the more redneck contingent of our friends. We missed the husband of the one friend because he was hunting boar in Tennessee, while she was off to the Jeff Foxworthy show Sat. night. Two other friends I visited with were working on a plow truck in my first friend’s garage. He is a cement contractor and out of work in the winter. Having lived in the trades, I am comfortable hanging around with rough types. Still, I might push them around a bit as I identify the misshapen effects of living with certain ‘belief’ systems.
Our conversation became vigorous as my friends have little regard for Muslims. After a short history lesson, the second friend said in effect, well the bible says the ‘good’ people will be protected. He made his case with an appeal for 'goodness' being about helping widows and neighbors. After pointing out that Muslims have a longstanding custom of welcoming the stranger, it was also asserted that paying for bombs for one neighbor to devastate the remaining walled in sliver of the original people of this land, is a hard thing to connect to the concept of ‘goodness’. This followed on into a suggestion that the very secular and humanist modernist faction of the Jewish community had won an inner-communal struggle, and so therefore my friend was allied with people that he theoretically despises. So yes, sure I make people uncomfortable, but I do back off when it is strategically appropriate. If I do my thing well these folk will remain friends as they later realize that I was attacking their misunderstandings and not them as people.
Truth be told, I have not done my thing so well with my more liberal and ‘spiritual’ oriented friends. Frankly, most are more thin-skinned than the traditionalists, yet able to push away questions of pretences and ego projections with a deft defiance of reality.
I find it a bit odd that I can engage better with rednecks than I am able to engage with folk that claim to care about the current and future condition of this world. Once again, left with a puzzle.
Our conversation became vigorous as my friends have little regard for Muslims. After a short history lesson, the second friend said in effect, well the bible says the ‘good’ people will be protected. He made his case with an appeal for 'goodness' being about helping widows and neighbors. After pointing out that Muslims have a longstanding custom of welcoming the stranger, it was also asserted that paying for bombs for one neighbor to devastate the remaining walled in sliver of the original people of this land, is a hard thing to connect to the concept of ‘goodness’. This followed on into a suggestion that the very secular and humanist modernist faction of the Jewish community had won an inner-communal struggle, and so therefore my friend was allied with people that he theoretically despises. So yes, sure I make people uncomfortable, but I do back off when it is strategically appropriate. If I do my thing well these folk will remain friends as they later realize that I was attacking their misunderstandings and not them as people.
Truth be told, I have not done my thing so well with my more liberal and ‘spiritual’ oriented friends. Frankly, most are more thin-skinned than the traditionalists, yet able to push away questions of pretences and ego projections with a deft defiance of reality.
I find it a bit odd that I can engage better with rednecks than I am able to engage with folk that claim to care about the current and future condition of this world. Once again, left with a puzzle.
posted by Sounder at 11:16 AM
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