Just for perspective I’ll tell you I’m a 63 year-old white guy. Today my wife and I went to a pool party at one of my wife’s best friend’s house. To be honest I love Lisa and Robert too. They are about the most generous people I know. And they’re conservative. Low information, Faux Fairytale, Donald Trump conservatives. But they know my wife and I are LIBERALS and we never talk politics with them. Lisa and Robert have friends all over the political spectrum and many times we all end up in a room together but we usually don’t talk politics. When conservative politics come up, my wife and I will look at each other and roll our eyes. I know she’s looking at me to see how I will react. Because I want to keep the peace I usually stay silent unless I ask a question to make them think.
There is one fellow though that I have tried to hint to that I am not a conservative and view things very differently. He sat down next to me and after a while he said, “What do you think about all those blacks rioting?”
I said, “Riots. I never heard about any rioting.”
He said, “Yeah, hundreds of them ran onto I-5 and shut it down. I don’t think they know what they want.”
I said, “Justice, pure and simple. Mostly these are protests. On I-5, that sounds like civil disobedience, not riots, but they stem from the same seed. I think this is one of those cases where you would have to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes before you would understand. As a white man, you have a lot of privileges that they don’t so when you take justice away, there’s not much left to lose. I get it, you don’t like black people but think about it, thousands of people don’t protest like this just for the fun of it, literally putting their lives in danger after seeing how some of the police handle these situations.”
He said, “No, no. I had a friend in Afghanistan.”
I told him, “Having a black friend is a lot different from experiencing what he’s experienced.”
He never said another word about it to me and I didn’t want to pursue it any further. I really just wanted him to know he did not find a kindred spirit in me.
