This was becoming an all too common experience for me. I'd be sitting at a bar, sipping my lemon drop martini with no sugar ice on the side, and someone would start talking politics. Isn't there a rule no politics or religion in bars? Seems as though a lot of rules have been thrown out the window of late, like the rule to be kind.
"Some fucking racist asshole wrote "even if they voted for Trump?" on my Love Your Neighbors No Matter Who They Are sign. Can you imagine the nerve of that guy? Had to be a guy, no doubt a dumb, redneck, gun toting, white supremacist, homophobic, moronic drug addict like all of them. They have got to go. That car in Charlottesville got the wrong person, it should have taken out a few dozen MAGA hats."
I bit my tongue. I bit it harder. I thought of my mother.
"Honey, the world has a lot of hate in it. Everybody thinks it's the other guy doing the hating. Just be sure you see hate in yourself when it is there, and turn it to love."
So love this man I did, because 'twas I who had written that on his sign.
Across the room a woman had to raise her voice to be heard over the ruckus. "So that new neighbor is feeding all the neighborhood cats. My yard is crawling with them. They fight all night long and I can not get any sleep. I tried calling the police but as long as she takes them for free rabies shots and gets them fixed, she hasn't broken any laws." Everyone in the bar heard this, including Mr. Love Your Neighbors, two stools to my right.
"That's right! The cops need to go too! Black Lives Matter!" This he nearly shouted, then raised his fist into the air and pumped it several times, looking around for support.
He got none.
The heater sputtered back off, the chill returned, and the silence along with it. Deeper this time, it was the silence of gritted teeth in nearly every mouth in that room. I knew what the Neighbor Lover did not; there was a table of officers memorializing the recent transition of one of their own, and the woman complaining about the cats was one of them.
"Pachinko! Pachinko! PACHINKO!" he demanded of his mother. She responded in Japanese trying to calm the poor boy, but he would not stop screaming "pachinkopachinkopachinko!"
Mr. Neighbor Lover's ire rose. He squirmed, he fumed, he put his feet to the floor and staggered over to the woman who was trying desperately to quiet her son. The table of officers became quiet and alert, watching.
"What the fuck does he WANT?" Neighbor Lover demanded of her. "Can't you just give it to him so he'll shut the fuck up?"
"Sorry sir, so sorry. He want play game, but game broken." She gestured to the pinball machine with the out of order sign on it.
Well, I feel like I need a fourth prompt to finish this story, but end it here I will because my time is up. You'll have to imagine for yourselves what a Neighbor Lover would do in a situation like this one. I surely don't know, or I would have told you myself. I will confess to the urge to write "even if they voted for Trump?" on those signs, because the most hateful and irrational people I know happen to be among my fellow liberals, and I for one think this is a very big problem.
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