Yesterday I was an asshole.
I was walking down the Venice boardwalk with my wife and 3 year old son. We were there to check out the big waves that were reportedly smashing into the beach, supposedly the biggest waves in 20 years. Turns out they'd peaked the day before, but it was still a nice day at the beach.
We were walking past one of the ubiquitous t-shirt shops where they hang up countless T-shirts so you can read them, plastered over the front of the store.
Some of them are funny, some are obnoxious, many are definitely politically incorrect.
But the one that caught my eye had a picture of a smiling Arnold Schwarzenegger and the words:
"Terminate Liberals"
Well I'm kind of a slow-burn kind of guy. So I kept walking. My wife had seen it, too, and we both moved on for a few feet in silence.
Then I found myself turning around and storming back to the shop. There was a young woman who worked there nearby. I grabbed the t-shirt and started unclipping it from its display. She walked up wondering what I was doing. She was Asian and spoke almost no English.
I tried to explain to her that the T-shirt was advocating killing a certain group of people. I told her this was unacceptable. I told her it was hate speech. I asked her if she thought it was appropriate to advocate killing a certain group of people at her T-shirt shop. I threw the t-shirt on the ground and stalked off.
I turned around and saw an older woman speaking with the younger woman. They were both glancing over at me. The older woman said in heavily accented English - "She just works here. You should talk to the manager". I said "Fine", stepped back to them and grabbed the T-shirt.
I walked into the store toward the middle-aged Asian man in the back, who was trying very hard to ignore me. I demanded his attention and showed him the shirt, explaining to him that this shirt advocated killing people. I asked if he thought it was appropriate to display a shirt that advocated killing another human being. I said "this shirt says that I should be killed. Do you think I should be killed?"
He kept saying "the company sends us those shirts. It's the company."
His English was poor and I'm not sure he really understood what the shirt said. I tried to explain, saying "what if this shirt said to kill Asian people. Would you put that shirt up outside?"
He just kept repeating that the company made him do it. It was the company, the company.
Finally I gave up and walked away. My wife had taken my son further down the boardwalk so he'd miss the whole confrontation, which was good.
I realized that I will no longer put up with any hate speech, toward me or anybody else. Fuck it, I don't even consider myself a liberal. But if anybody says "terminate ____" they're gonna have a problem with me.
I am so sick of these fuckers who think it's funny to advocate killing people. They think it's okay for THEM. "Oh, it's just a joke". This all goes back to the whole "Rush LImbaugh is just an entertainer.
Yeah right. And that's just another goddamn lie, one of the early ones in the endless chain that has proceeded to brainwash a generation of Americans.
Should we all start wearing T-shirts that say "kill the Republicans?" Do you think you could sell those at the beach?