Under the category of “I can’t believe I said that,” I have a new high (or is that low?). Backed into a corner on Thursday night for our awkward and unhappy class supper, I am certain I made myself seem like the weirdest left-wing nut ever to walk the planet.
It didn't start off too bad, I guess. At first, when someone pointed out that the provincial equalizing payments were off balance, I only mildly stuck my foot in my mouth. They noted that the province of Ontario pays something like four times the amount that it gets back from the federal government in funding. Lamely, attempting to be funny, but also being the ever-bitter Maritimer that I am, I roundly replied that the difference was the “Jerk Tax” that Ontario owed the rest of us for putting up with the snottiest province yet to exist. There was silence for a split second, until Andrew (Heaven bless that man) promptly burst out in laughter and semi-agreed. He, too, is from Atlantic Canada, so he saved me. Bless him, again and again. I should have taken that as a sign to quit while I was ahead.
But did I? I think you can answer that question yourselves.
And, no, the second time I wasn’t so lucky. On the ride home with several classmates, Andrew suggested that he liked the Liberal party’s policy of completely confiscating and controlling the availability of handguns. I and another woman argued that this would not stop violence (as Wednesday night’s fatal stabbing of a 17-year-old woman in Montreal ably illustrated). Rather, social ills should be targeted. The tightening of gun laws only made handguns more expensive on the illegal market, and less traceable by the law. He countered by saying that the way some countries (Korea, I think he said) have made it illegal for anyone but the government to control handguns has worked there. I did not know anything about this area, but did I dummy up? No. Why? Because, you see, I seem to have been struck by that same stroke-caused illness that the granny on Golden Girls had, and I am, therefore, unable to keep my trap shut even when clearly unaware of new facts entered into the conversation.
So what did I say? Oh, I blush at the thought.
Being the Democratic reactionary that I am, I responded that I didn’t think that allowing the government to be the only one with guns sounded like a good idea. And here’s the kicker: I said this wasn’t such a great thing with a man like Harper in charge, and intimated that I, and my ethnic and ideological cohort, should not be unarmed under him.
So everyone in the car looked at me like I was some paranoid idiot who hid under my bed with a rifle in case neo-Cons were planning a pogrom against me. Undaunted, or at least unwilling to stop, I finished by saying, “Well, call it over-sensitivity, but if people had been more sensitive when a certain short, clownish German guy we all know and hate came into power, many more people might have lived to tell the tale.”
So, great. Have proven myself to be a massively nervous and hateful left-winger who is bent on demonizing our new PM-elect with comparisons with Hitler… And then played the race card just to get out of uncomfortable conversation… And then sounded like I support the NRA in desire to protect self from said neo-Con government, a la Unibomber-type loony case.
In the end, I had made things worse by pulling the spear out of my own chest to defend the dying horse that was my original argument, but with a style that even Al Gore would have avoided.
So, if classmates did not think I was a commie-cum-lunatic before, they do now, with quotes to back up my Ontario-hating, anti-WASP agenda. I have become the subversive, militant, pinko Jew they all suspected me of being… And all I wanted was to participate in a grown-up conversation without sounding like a comedian who had wondered in from the service elevator in the Catskills.
Brilliant. Mission accomplished. Well done, Holly.
(Crap.)
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