(Sadly, this is not surprising these days. – promoted by lowkell)
I went to pick up some dry cleaning at the cleaners off of Ox Road, in Fairfax Station. While I was pulling out of the parking lot and waiting at the light, the man next to me made an indication that he wanted something. Obligingly, I leaned over, rolled my window down (my car doesn’t have push button windows) and asked, “Can I help you?”
He then yells, “Did you really vote for Obama?”
(My car has bumper stickers of all kinds of Dems, and the Obama sticker is particularly sticky.)
“Yes,” I answered him. “I did.”
He gets red in the face and screams (and I mean scream, and I’ve raised a two year old) “Thank you for destroying my country.”
I smiled and said, “Any time.”
Then we both drove away. I did note that he was driving a new looking Mercedes, which obviously cost a whole lot more than my nearly 10 year old Saturn. Maybe his notion of “destroying a country” is different from mine.
But here’s the thing — I would never, in a hundred years, have said something like that to a Republican during the worst of the Bush years (or the Reagan years, which I also lived through.) And I think I’m someone who has been more sympathetic to voter anger than most — I think most emotion is valid simply because someone feels that way, whether I do or not. But now I’m not so sure I should feel that way. Republicans talk a lot about their rights to think they way they want without criticism, and I’ve always defended those rights.
But what about my right to pick up my dry cleaning in my own neighborhood without being screamed at?
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