I have recently - yet again - come across a person that chipped my faith in humanity and shook the precarious balance of my deliberately chosen optimistic attitude.
What started as a perfectly civilised dinner with acquaintances or even old friends, turned into a soliloquy on the dangers of immigrants, dirty unacceptable religions and intense anger over the paranoid belief that different cultural values will swallow us live. The soliloquy - as the word implies - was carried out by a single person while three other people were trying to unboggle the mind, gaping at the man thinking this must surely be some sort of a delayed flashback from the 80s illegal party drugs. (Not sure why I tried to apply that particular explanation to myself as I was in primary school in the 1980s and thus a complete and utter stranger to drugs, both illegal as well as over the counter variety but at that moment of profound confusion and shock, my mind ... well, boggled. Perhaps the self-preservation mechanism or the deeply ingrained love of Philosophy tried to make sense out of nonsense for the truth was indeed too ugly to accept.) Untrue to the concept of a sololoquy, howevevr, it was not the act of speaking to oneself. There was the audience. Captive audience. The best kind for performers like these. The audience chained to their seats by good manners. The audience who despite their better judgement do not dramatically leave the table shouting expletives in alphabetical order and in a few languages while mentally looking for the nearest placce that would sell them a nicely polished sharp catana so that they could return only moments later re-enacting a scene or two from Tarantino's films.
The soliloquy in short was: "Foreigners should never come here. I, for example, know nothing about India, I have no interest in the country, and don't care about their filthy culture. But because of this I would never even dream of going there, let alone move there. And they shouldn't either. People have no right to move to other countries or parts of the world. They have no right to move to places where the culture, religion and language are different and then force the country into Sharia law. And gang rape women. Because this is what has been happening in this country. And don't pretend it hasn't because we all know it."
As, anticlimactically indeed, none of the catana wielding or voice raising happened, the sololoquy was interrupted only with a few feeble attempts of "Surely, that is a bit extreme," and "Oh come on, nobody is trying to take over and ruin our lives," followed by an unbearably civilised attampet of ending the spiel and changing the subject (I believe it was something along the lines of people are entitled to different opinions but perhaps we should not discuss certain topics. Or none of them ... Ever again. The latter was my boggled undrugged mind, body, soul and consciousness overcoming the state of utter shock and looking suspiciously like it might verbally play out the aforementioned Tarantino scene.) By then it had become obvious that what we had been witnessing was definitely not a bad soliloquy but rather a monologue.
As the mind still boggled, the consciousness and the character took over and the words were formed: "Well, we need to leave. The kids are home alone so we really shouldn't keep them waiting." The goodbye was all the bitterness of the bitter and there was no handshake, a hug or an airkiss that usually acoompanies such moments. The after-taste in my mouth and the sickening gurgling in my stomach were rivaled only by the blind rage, humiliation and disappointment at myself ringing in my ears. I had a sololoquy, followed by a dialogue a few minutes later. It didn't help. The failure was obvious and has been making me occasionally sick ever since.
I failed. I am ashamed. I did not tell the idiot to stick it where the sun don't shine. Repeatedly. I did not even try to get that catana and rid the world of idiotic vermin. Instead I tried to argue the case with a few feelble attempts of reasoning with the stupidest of racists and nationalists I have come across in a long time. Why? Because it was polite and well-mannered to not do that to a partner of my partner's friend? Because it's polite and civilised not to shout, scream and claw at the sad excuse of a human being in public? Perhaps. Still, that rationalisation doesn't make me feel any better. The fact is that I ended up being the one who was backward and stupid. Backward because I let it. Stupid because I let social norms get in the way of fighting againts something that should not even exist.
My only excuse? I don't speak Stupid. Unforunately I am capable of being stupid. Because taking it like a little well-mannered immigrant is exactly that. It's just as backward as the abomination attacking everyone and everything that Mr. Stupid doesn't like or understand. And doing so by zero factual evidence, of course, because that is stupidity by definition.
The most disguisting part? The monologue was delivered by an immigrant. A privileged white male who got to the country as a young boy and has always had it a little easier simply because he is a descendant of the original conquerors. A slightly higher caste than the rest of the country (and much higher than the original inhabitants). So stupidity is fine as long as it is packed into a package of tradition and once-upon-a-time acceptable values. I say No! (with an intensity of a catana-weilding Uma Thurman with blood spluttering on every one of those idiots)
I still choose to be an optimist and believe in humanity. Humanity is OK. 90% of people are idiots (Apologies nand thanks to Slavoj Žižek for (ab)using his quote yet again) and sadly we are all capable of acting like idiots. I did. I chose politeness over well-deserved brutality albeit it would only have been verbal. But I intend to get better. I won't learn to speak Stupid for a start.
I'm thinking either Arabic or Spanish could be the sixth lenguage I learn. Stupid is too soul-crushing ...
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