With tax season coming to a close I finally get a moment to think about something other than taxes. It’s only one day off, the calm before the storm, in more ways than one, but it allows me a moment to write. For that I am grateful.
In my three jobs I get to know/work with many kinds of people. Even here in the supposed conservative bastion of Utah liberals run free. Sadly, the once great city of Salt Lake may be lost forever. The public education system here has much to answer for.
While working one of my jobs Mr. X, I’ll call him that to respect his privacy, and I were having a brief chat about freedom in general. He routinely claims to love freedom then says things like the NSA is welcome to spy on him all they want. While I doubt Mr. X has much to hide, his caviler attitude towards domestic warrantless spying is troubling to those of us who truly love freedom. In fact he ended his participation in the conversation by stating flatly that if “you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.” Right, and work sets you free.
During another recent conversation about how moslems were taking over certain places in America (I referred to Dearborn, Michigan specifically) and refusing, in general, to assimilate I was especially surprised by his attitude on two counts. Remember, he considers himself the voice of reason and says he loves freedom.
First, since he hadn’t heard about this from “the news” he didn’t believe it. I was, he intimated, making this stuff up. I told him the facts are readily apparent if one is willing to spend a few minutes on the internet. He “doubted very much” that the moslems in Dearborn were implementing sharia law. Besides, even if they did that was “their business”. I found that statement quite curious given his frequent rantings against religious people for “forcing their religion” down his throat. Mr. X was totally fine with moslems taking over Dearborn, MI but is furious that the “Mormons, right here” in “his” home state deny him “right after right”. As a Mormon who has never denied anyone a constitutionally protected right (and I don’t know any Mormons who would) I asked what rights he was being denied. The only answer he could come up with was how happy he was when the Olympics were in Salt Lake City. He walked around downtown Salt Lake City with a beer in his hands because he could. Oh the inhumanity of being denied open beer carry on public streets! So I guess, based on his own testimony, it is far more important to be able to “piss off” Mormons by open carrying a beer on the streets of Salt Lake City than it is to deny moslems the “right to their culture” even though their culture includes things like honor killings and female genital mutilation.
Secondly, I was surprised at just how fast he played the race card on me. Apparently noticing these things, or maybe pointing these things out in public, makes me a racist. (There would be little point trying to explain that islam is not a race, the race card is to valuable an asset to allow to be sidetracked by something as irrelevant as the truth) Mr. X, having lost this argument once before (when I pointed out and he denied that the Kenyan ever said republicans were welcome to work with him as long as we went to the back of the bus) should have known better. Apparently his cognitive dissonance got the better of him. At this point I felt the massively unjustified need to defend myself. I told Mr. X that his belief in said events was not required for them to be true. As for calling me a racist I pointed out that I work on a daily basis with three black men and that my best friend in the whole world is hispanic. These facts I continued present no problems to me at all but rendered his attack shallow, uninformed and pedantic. I admit I threw the last word in simply because I knew he would have no idea what it meant. A little confusion can be a wonderful thing to watch.
Needless to say, our “friendship” is now reduced to a much more formal working relationship. As sad as that is, that is his choice. I don’t play that kind of game as I have no problem defending my beliefs. I don’t make stuff up or deny reality. Forty year old five year olds do though. In some cases they do routinely.
I guess the point of all this is just to point out that this is how liberals/progressives think or, more properly, refuse to think. They are so focused on their virtue signaling that the truth becomes an impediment to them constructing their self image. There are far to many Mr. X’s out there who live comfortable but majorly deluded lives. They surround themselves with like minded dispensers of “reason”, “justice” and “compassion” resulting in an often impenetrable bubble of self righteous cognitive dissonance. Which, when you think about it, is highly ironic. They suffer from the very condition, often much more severely, than the “religious” people they like to label as self righteous, insensitive and bigoted.
It has been my sad experience of the last forty years that there is virtually no way to breach the walls of self absorbed virtue that encapsulate most people like Mr. X. Until someone drops him into one of the many no go zones in Dearborn and he physically experiences the foulness of islam up close and personal he will never “get it.”
As a supporter of gay marriage I hope Mr. X never has to witness a gay man being thrown from the roof of a ten story building in the name of islam. I fear though that something like that is the only thing that will breach the wall he has surrounded himself with. Yet people like him consider people like me unreasonable. How sad.
frigatenavysailor 