Waiting in line at my local hardware store, a man I sort of recognized but didn’t really know kindly informed me that, “Joe Biden is a Communist.”
“How nice for him,” I said.
Really, I’ve run out of ways to respond to ignorance, and sometimes I just want to buy Gorilla Glue without having to defend democracy, so I just say whatever comes to mind.
This was insufficient for this gentleman, whose wrinkled pale face was gnawing at the memory banks but whose name I just could not place.
“No, I’m not kidding,” he said as he leaned over the edge of his cart, his dark brown eyes a little closer to mine than I’m normally comfortable with. “He’s a straight-up Commie.”
There are three people in front of me at the store’s one lonely open cash register. One of them has what appears to be two handfuls of assorted screws and bolts of all shapes and sizes. The checkout clerk, a kind young man I’ve spoken to many times, is struggling to locate the price on a plunger.
I’m going to be here for eternity.
I sigh. “Ok.” It’s all I have the strength to offer this man, but I know there’s more to come.
It’s my own fault. I’m wearing a shirt that says, among other things, “Black Lives Matter,” and “Love is Love,” and “Science is Real,” and something about chemtrails.
I should’ve expected to be told all about Joe Biden being a Communist. Obviously, by what I was wearing, I was asking for it.
“You mark my words, Earl, if you snowflakes keep puttin’ folks like Biden ‘n’ Obama ‘n’ Hillary ‘n’ nem in the White House, we’ll be speakin’ Chinese before the sun comes up.”
He called me Earl.
That was my grandfather’s name. My mom’s dad. It’s my middle name.
My full name is Jørn Earl Otte. Don’t worry if you can’t pronounce it. Most people can’t. Hell, I mispronounced my own name up until I was 12. Even now I only say my first name correctly when I’m in the proper mood.
My Dad came to the USA from Denmark as a foreign exchange student to a small high school in a tiny town in the mountains of Appalachia. He met my mom. They fell in love. Et cetera, et cetera.
Now, I’m a grown man with home improvement projects sprouting up at every corner, and I just need some damn gorilla glue.
But since he called me Earl, the lightbulb clicked on and the synapses fired a shot straight across the bow. I figured out who he is, and why he felt so comfortable letting my snowflake ass know how soon I’ll be speaking Mandarin and memorizing Marx.
And as I step one customer closer to checking outta here, I also know how to end this brief one-sided conversation, and end it in my favor.
“You’re Mr. O’Neal, right? Bill?”
His hardened stare softens slightly. “Yep. Thought you knew that, though, or I would’ve said something.”
“Gramps really liked you,” I say. “Loved you, actually.”
I pause just a second to let that settle on his ear drums, perhaps penetrate his hippocampus ever so slightly, but I keep going before he can respond.
“Yeah, I have some fond memories of you and Gramps farting around the cow field, cussing and carrying on,” I chuckle. “As a little fella running around Gramps’ yard, trying not to step in horseshit or cow patties or whatever other land mines were out there, I always felt this deep kinda happiness — peacefulness really — anytime I heard my grandfather laugh.
“And you Bill,” I point my finger right at him, “you could always make Gramps laugh.”
The guy with the surfeit of screws had bolted, and it was blissfully my turn to checkout. I place my gorilla glue on the counter, the bright-eyed blond-headed Edgar the Cashier, complete with nose-ring and beautifully lavish tattoo sleeve, asks the inevitable.
“How are you this evening, sir?”
I give the traditional middle class white guy bullshit response.
“Living the dream, Edgar.”
He provides the obligatory laugh.
“Yeah Bill,” I continue, as my glue goes beep-beep across the scanner and Edgar tells me a price and I fiddle with my wallet. “Gramps loved you. I can’t believe he’s been gone for 15 years now.”
I sigh a deep, purposeful, melodramatic sigh, then I lean toward him, the same way he leaned toward me earlier, and I close with the kill:
“Thanks for always being there for him.”
Bill doesn’t say a word. Not one single word. He just nods.
This is the response I expected, and I turn away, taking my newly purchased home improvement project aid, and a deeply felt serenity, out the door and to my home.
Frankly, I don’t really give a shit if someone is a Republican or Democrat or Green Party Member or Independent or Democratic Socialist or Still Looking.
What I care about is Compassion with a Capital C. Love. Empathy. Kindness. Genuine fucking kindness.
What I hope I left Bill with was a good feeling deep in his soul about an old friend. I hope I made him feel good about himself and the kindness he showed my grandfather so often so long ago.
And I hold a faint sliver of hope that this small act alone will at least give him pause to consider the comments he said to me. He said them out of a misplaced anger. He said them to trigger a response. He said them because he, like so many other people in poverty-stricken working-class America, has been beaten down by a Capitalist system that has lied about the American Dream and instead taught him to hate and blame the other.
We will absolutely never improve our communities, our country, or our fragile little world, if all we do is yell at each other.
I’m not naive. I’m no fool, and I recognize there are genuine jackasses in society. There are racists and homophobes and xenophobes and misogynists and sexists and idiots — and sometimes there is a person who is all of these things and then gets elected President.
Evil exists. Stupid wields power. Corruption and greed have poisoned humanity for 10,000 years.
They’re not going away just because I give a bigot a hug or buy a homophobe a coffee or give an old man with an ignorant viewpoint a warm fuzzy about Gramps.
But they wouldn’t go away if I had yelled and argued with Bill either. So why not share some love?
Why not show compassion? After all, in the never-ending war on hatred, it is the greatest weapon of all.
– Jørn Earl Otte lives and writes in Appalachia. He is exhausted
