Wanna Fight About It?

My issue in a nutshell:

Extremely fat woman walks out of a Starbucks sucking on one of those 800 calorie iced coffee ice cream blends. She is special clothes fat. She is two seats on an airplane fat.

My immediate reaction – Christ, look at this incredibly fat woman sucking down mountains of empty calories. Horrible. There ought to be a law.

Fat woman walks right past me, and then right past another table with a pair of twentysomethings at it. As she passes they look at each other and say something like, Jesus, look at that fat lady and her fat drink. Pathetic.

And like THAT, even as I’m watching fat lady struggle mightily just to get into the van that’s stopped at the curb to pick her up, I find myself immediately on the other side, staring at these twentysomethings and thinking, f you, so the fat lady wants her iced coffee, it’s a free country. Who are you to judge! Are those cigarettes on your table? Hypocrites.

The point isn’t weather or not anyone was right about anything. The point is that I suddenly realized just how quickly and unconsciously I’m programmed to disagree with pretty much any statement made by anyone, even if it’s the same statement I made just seconds before. They call this being contrarian. It’s not really an assert in case I made it sound like one. I spent a lot money on tuition while more or less refusing to learn anything because, you know, they wanted me to. Since I stopped paying someone to teach me I’ve studied more, simply because there’s no one to care if I do or don’t.

Another example: I saw a trailer for The Nativity Story, during which I was just dumbfounded by the fact that someone has basically turned a Sunday School filmstrip into a Christmas movie release which will doubtless make gobs of money in just the sort of small towns where I grew up. It looks retarded. It looks cynical. It looks ready to capitalize on herds of religious sheep. And then in that pause after the trailer ends someone shouts, “and don’t forget to vote republican,” which instantly makes me decide he’s an asshole, and all these people who are laughing are assholes, and that probably they’re as bad as the people they’re decrying because they’re just as intolerant to other points of view. I suddenly want to debate the merits of this spiritual film with all these heathens. But, you know, the movie starts.

I feel pretty secure that I know where I stand on this or that. I consider myself to have a fairly defined position on any number of issues. But among conservatives I sound liberal, among liberals, conservative. You drive a Hummer? You’re a gas guzzling moron trying to compensate for a small penis. You drive a Prius? You’re a self righteous dirtbag who’s less interested in saving the planet than appearing holier than your fellow commuters. These reactions are completely contradictory and completely automatic.

How certain someone appears about being right is directly proportional to how certain I am that they’re wrong. Is it healthy? Probably not. Would I change it if I could? It would certainly cut down on meaningless debate around the house. But as annoying as it is, I’m genuinely scared of people who only speak in declarative sentences and those who just drink it in. There seem to be more people like this than ever. So maybe questioning everything, even the things you’ve just said, isn’t the worst thing in the world.

What do you mean it’s not the worst thing? Of course it is. You think you’re better than me?

Idiot.