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I had a computer technician in my house today to repair a busted keyboard. At the risk of projecting onto him, he reminded me a lot of the comp-sci men I had courses with when I was doing my math BS in Greensboro. Educated and intelligent, certainly, but educated in a very different way: how-to more than how-come, as I used to say back then.
His politics are relevant because we got talking about how I was a recent returnee from a big city, which got us talking on how COVID changed so many aspects of our living situations, and how I was back south partly because when I started spending more time at home I wanted more space than I could afford in NYC. He compared having to wear badges with your vaccination status to 1940s Germany, but I don't think it was meant as hateful. More that he was used to being busy, fixing things in the way that made the most sense to him, and probably not particularly comfortable with changes he didn't have the time to understand and feel at ease with. It helped that we'd been talking one on one for a while at that point and I felt generally listened to by him.
Still, my first instinct was to argue back that keeping Jews and others from shopping in certain stores, while definitely not good, was not really the worst thing that made Nazis so objectionable. Instead I acknowledged that my experience in a population-dense city, never mind one that was absolutely steamrolled by the pandemic's early days to the point a lot of things completely shut down and going to an in-person store if you could prove you were vaccinated felt like an earned privilege more than a restriction. (Erm, probably in much smaller words.) I said I thought some distance of social distancing made sense for everyone, but maybe not the same extent in all situations, and also that it probably was presented in a way that made people from less-dense and more freedom-focused areas feel like they were being told not to do in ways they weren't used to. In my mind, that's understandable when the experts are so busy keeping people from dying, and are probably exhausted on their own. But as he saw it, this was American and we generally try to let people make up their own minds; and all the mandates felt out of place with that ethic.
I don't know that any of us actually changed our mind, I sure didn't, but it was a good encounter anyway. Because I stopped and thought through why a reasonable person might feel that way; and because it was a conversation full of context with an actual physical person in front of me. I felt like someone not like me really listened to me and thought about what I had to say, which was also nice.
Maybe I spend too much time online and alone, but I do think we need more of that these days. Just, you know, with less Nazi comparisons.
His politics are relevant because we got talking about how I was a recent returnee from a big city, which got us talking on how COVID changed so many aspects of our living situations, and how I was back south partly because when I started spending more time at home I wanted more space than I could afford in NYC. He compared having to wear badges with your vaccination status to 1940s Germany, but I don't think it was meant as hateful. More that he was used to being busy, fixing things in the way that made the most sense to him, and probably not particularly comfortable with changes he didn't have the time to understand and feel at ease with. It helped that we'd been talking one on one for a while at that point and I felt generally listened to by him.
Still, my first instinct was to argue back that keeping Jews and others from shopping in certain stores, while definitely not good, was not really the worst thing that made Nazis so objectionable. Instead I acknowledged that my experience in a population-dense city, never mind one that was absolutely steamrolled by the pandemic's early days to the point a lot of things completely shut down and going to an in-person store if you could prove you were vaccinated felt like an earned privilege more than a restriction. (Erm, probably in much smaller words.) I said I thought some distance of social distancing made sense for everyone, but maybe not the same extent in all situations, and also that it probably was presented in a way that made people from less-dense and more freedom-focused areas feel like they were being told not to do in ways they weren't used to. In my mind, that's understandable when the experts are so busy keeping people from dying, and are probably exhausted on their own. But as he saw it, this was American and we generally try to let people make up their own minds; and all the mandates felt out of place with that ethic.
I don't know that any of us actually changed our mind, I sure didn't, but it was a good encounter anyway. Because I stopped and thought through why a reasonable person might feel that way; and because it was a conversation full of context with an actual physical person in front of me. I felt like someone not like me really listened to me and thought about what I had to say, which was also nice.
Maybe I spend too much time online and alone, but I do think we need more of that these days. Just, you know, with less Nazi comparisons.
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Thank you for sharing this with us!
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