A Right-Wing Call For Rough Men
AUGUST 17, 2021
. . .
I had an interesting exchange recently with a man I met at my local Panera where I often have a breakfast sandwich and coffee while I read The New York Times. I’d seen this fellow a few days earlier limping very painfully, so I stopped to ask how he was feeling. We exchanged some old-man stuff: he was dealing with gout, diabetes and neuropathy, while I had gone through prostate cancer and triple bypass heart surgery. It came out he was a Vietnam veteran, as am I. We also shared VA benefits; he’s been at 60% for some time, and I’m now at 70% — both cases due to what is called “presumptive” connections with Agent Orange.
Then, we somehow got onto politics, and it came out he’d voted for Trump and I’d voted for Biden. This seemed to surprise him. Suddenly, all the things we had shared (including that it was good Joe Biden was getting out of Afghanistan) went out the window and he soon said: “The trouble with you people is . . .”
I laughed. “You people?”
One of his grievances was liberals like me always want to help people out; we want to open the border and let everybody in; we want to raise taxes. The list goes on.
“Wait a minute. We both just agreed Vietnam never should have happened and that we’re now both on the tax-based government tit.”
He apparently had no comeback for this and just stared at me. He said he was a “physical conservative.” I told him, despite liberal tendencies, I was a conservative on a lot of things. To me, that meant life is complicated. But, apparently, whatever kind of conservative I was didn’t qualify.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/17/a-right-wing-call-for-rough-men/
= new reply since forum marked as read
