Another subway story

[flexagon]

Someone was explicitly racist to me on the subway tonight. It started off innocently enough: "Is that thread? Are you happy?" I nodded (I did have thread; he wasn't that crazy). Pretty soon the guy involved was pointing at me going "HEY YOU! Why you kill people? Why you white people kill people?" Ignoring him didn't work. A firm "I'm not doing anything" got "No shit!" in an aggrieved tone of voice. Sharing an I-can't-win smile at that with the woman next to him just got her a talking to. By the time we got to my stop, he was just haranguing me not to kill people ("All I'm saying is people shouldn't kill people. That's what I believe. Okay? Just don't kill people, all right?") to which I responded "All right!" in a positive tone as I got off, because really, I tend to agree with that point. "All right!" he said back, and that was that.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

~Kurt Vonnegut

Comments

[webrat.livejournal.com]

I thought for sure that you were making all this up because it just seems so radical to suddenly appear out of the blue on a subway transit to home. However, nothing indicated that you were making it up and ... I was just befuddled and came to the conclusion that I'm better off not riding public transportation because I really don't know what I'd do in that situation.

[flexagon]

Hahaha. I couldn't make up material this good. "Is that thread? Are you happy?" You have now tempted me to start a series of completely fanciful posts about what happened to me on the subway that day, and I might do it, but this one is true. :)

I could have walked away from the guy, even switched cars on the train at some intermediate stop, if I didn't feel like listening, but it was kind of interesting. There are a lot of possible things to do, and in some ways (kind of like you said) I think it's good to be in the occasional weird-but-not-dangerous situation, because it does make me able to handle them.