Comments that just blow you away

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was at a friend’s pub last night, and was having a conversation with a guy named Frank. Frank seems like a nice enough chap. He’s 50 years old, but looks much younger. He served in the Navy and IIRC, saw active duty during the first Gulf War. He works or worked for the post office, went to college, and is currently back in school on the GI bill.

As I was getting ready to leave, I said “I’ll see you around, maybe some Monday at the weekly gathering.”

He said, “I don’t come to that anymore, ever since Z started inviting niggers. I can’t sit and drink with niggers. Now I’ll allow as some black people can be educated and speak well and all, but I can’t stand niggers, and that’s what these folks are. They’re a drain on our society…”

He continued on for some time, expounding on the how he knows not everyone thinks like he does, but he’s not interested in mixing races, said that there’s no black country in the world that has been successful, that Muslims are our enemies (he referenced some of the extreme right wing Danish politicians), that the good races will always rise to the top (Whites and Asians seem to be okay in his book), ad nauseum. I was truly stunned, but I didn’t say anything because I was too curious to see what else would come out. He said it all in such a matter of fact sort of way.

It just gobsmacks me that educated people can really think and feel this way. And since there is one, I’m sure that there are a lot more. To be clear, it’s not as if I thought that there wasn’t any racism out there; I just thought that most folks wouldn’t be so open in airing their views.

Fortunately I’m not likely to run into him too often, if at all again, especially as I usually go to this particular place on Mondays, and he avoids the same place on that night.

Sorry about the language in the quoted parts, but I felt it should be replicated as close as possible to the way it came out.

2

That’s the point where I get up and walk away.

3

I was talking to a woman - we’ll call her Mrs. B - at work, and I threw in a Yiddish word (I think we were talking about personal stuff on peoples’ desks, and I referred to said stuff as tchotchkes).

Mrs. B said, “I didn’t know you associated with Jews.”

My partner is Jewish. Even weirder, so’s Mrs. B’s son-in-law.

4

I was at City Hall a few years ago, attending the Mayor and Board of Aldermen meeting (I was a City employee at the time).

During a break (the Board had gone into Executive Session for a few minutes) people were standing around in the foyer waiting for the meeting to start back up. I was standing in a circle with the Fire Chief, Police Chief, Public Works Director, and a restaurant owner.

The restaurant owner had come to the meeting to talk about some noise complaints which a woman had complained about. This was an elderly lady who lived near the restaurant, and she had complained about staff standing around the back door talking loudly and hollering.

The owner was angry about the old woman’s complaints. He was complaining about it to the circle when he popped out with “I should just send some of those young bucks over to Mrs. X’s house to rape her, then, see if she likes that!”.

I was too shocked to speak. I will not speak to that man to this day.

5

Same here. End of Association. Buh-bye.

6

A black community leader was speaking with a reporter about education issues - discrimination, etc. facing black children in the public schools. When the reporter asked him about Hispanic children, he said, “I don’t care about them.”

Right. That’s nice.

7

My dear God. Does this wacko still own a restaurant here?

Every time I talk about one of my friends at work, or the kids talk about school friends, my MIL says, “Are they black or white?” I sometimes just ignore it and go on, but most of the time I reply, “Does it matter?”

8

No, he sold it, but he’s been dabbling in real estate lately so I still hear of him from time to time.

9

Unfortunately the disadvantage of being in Northern Ireland, having a surname which could be from either side of the sectarian divide and looking a little bit foreign means that people either see me a s"other" and thus say stupid stuff in front of me, or “same” and say stupid stuff in front of me.

Examples…

Endless variations on the theme of:
“Where are you from?”
“Here”
“No, where are you originally from?”
“Here”
“Well you don’t look it…must be some colourful leaves on your family tree”
This is never said in a nice way.

“So…how do you spell your last name?”
“irishlastname”
“Oh…”
This is either “oh thank goodness you’re one of us”, or “oh shit, you’re one of them” depending on inflection.

Actually…the worst was a patient who demanded of a male nurse (who he mistook for my boss) that he be treated by a “real” doctor and not “that wee chinky girl”. He was ejected from the Emergency Department by security after being informed that I was the only doctor in the department that night and he had just forfeited his right to be treated there.

Sometimes I like Zero Tolerance policies.

10

One of our American subcontractors is working on Sir Very English Name’s house.

"He’s Jewish, I didn’t know Jews could be “Sir”. Doesn’t he have to be English or something? I though Jews were all from Europe … or … " trails off.

What’s the installation? A very extensive set of Christmas lights. :smiley:

11

I’m interested in other cultures. If I’m getting to know someone who is obviously of a different ethnicity, particularly if there is an accent, I’ll usually ask, ‘‘Where is your family from?’’ That way I’m not assuming the person was born in another country but am still expressing an interest in the cultural difference.

I always assumed that was okay, but now I’m wondering. Is that a question that would bother/offend you?

In response to the OP, I thought for a moment you were one of my classmates, who met an off-duty police officer in a bar who was chatting her up. In mid-flirtation, he started ranting about n*****s in the Philadelphia inner-city and told her a story about how he recently smashed a black teen’s head against the hood of his car.

She decided not to tell him she was gay.

12

The front of our home sits directly on a road with somewhat busy pedestrian traffic. When you’re sitting in our living room, you can hear the conversations of people walking by quite clearly.

A few days ago, I caught this bit of brilliance: “…but it’s not going to make any difference. Those people are nothing but a race of fucking savages. If this country weren’t so damn PC, we’d spill the blood of every damn one of them into the street.”

Yeah – obviously they’re the savages.

13

I am interested in this thread.

I was born in the U.K. Although I really was born in Scotland. :wink:

I moved to Northern Ireland as a toddler. My first year of school was in Northern Ireland, where I learned to hate the Catholics. I remember throwing stones at the Catholics as they boarded the school bus. They deserved to be hit, and injured, since they were different, and we hated their kind.

Then we moved to Canada when I was 6. Within a year or two I lost my British accent (mixture of Scots and Irish at that point) and assimilated into Canada, eh.

I am a white male. I have no accent (in my territory!) yet for years I heard all about those foreigners coming and taking “our” jobs. I still hear assholes talk about how immigration policies are wrecking the country, and such. When I try to tell them that I, in fact, am an immigrant, the shocked response is typically something like “Well, not really. You’re just like us?”

FWIW: I’m now married to a Catholic. My kids are Catholic. My Grandmother is spinning in her grave.

14

**olivesmarch4th **, there is a difference between trying, as you put it, to express a genuine interest in a cultural difference and trying to suss out where someone is from so you can mentally put them into the “ok” box or the “not ok” box. I like to think I can tell the difference- the former isn’t offensive, the latter is.

If I think someone is genuinely interested (and to be honest they better be interested, because it’s a bit complicated) I’ll tell them that my mum was born in Zimbabwe and that her father left Germany in the 1930s to escape what would become the Holocaust.

If I’m getting a weird vibe I’ll just shut down that avenue of conversation (because it actually isn’t any of their business and is rarely relevant to the matter at hand).

Now, that’s my personal take on it, and other people may feel differently-especially people who are obviously of a minority ethnicity. I’m just kind of “not Irish” looking, which makes people curious.

15

I wish the hospital(s) at which I trained had similar policies.

Your ER story reminds me of one night when I was a medical student covering trauma call with the surgery residents. We had this absolutely shitfaced lady come into the ER having split her lower lip wide open after falling down the stairs of the bar she was leaving. She started screaming about how she wanted “an American doctor”, instead of the (Indian-American) senior resident, the (Chinese-American) intern, and me.

Another time, when I was a resident, we went to go do a needle aspiration on this old lady in clinic. While I was setting up, I noted that she had a rash on her legs and asked her how long that had been going on. She launched into this rambly tirade about how it started when “they” began sandblasting on a construction site across the street from where she lived. As I struggled to make sense of this story, she then leaned in conspiratorially and whispered “It was the Jews. They did it to me.”

16

Damn, looks like I gotta start coming by during the week. I wish I’d been there.
I’m trying to remember who this is, care to help me out?

17

Some of my friends from the North who have been out and about lived down here have got questions like “Is it Belfast or Béal Feirste?” etc. crudely trying to suss them out. I got asked a few times if I were Catholic or Protestant, not in the north but around the border, when people heard my family were from Tyrone.

18

Yep. Like asking if you’re from Derry, or Londonderry. N’est-ce pas?

19

Is it FATDAD or FATLAD? haitch or aitch? Left-footed, right-footed? Eyes close together, eyes far apart? :smiley:

20

I can’t say as you would have ever met him. Now that I think of it, he had some extremely “enlightened” comments about women, too. I could just see the brawl that would ensue if you’d have been there.