How Soon Will You Get a Booster?

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Originally Posted by happystuff

You were twenty and it sounds like it was a new and different experience in your life at that point in time. Knowing you would handle a similar situation differently now shows that the twenty-year-old you has had more experiences and has learned - not only about others but about yourself. Compassion and sympathy for others are good qualities to have and are worth learning. Forgive yourself and continue being the good human being you are striving to be.

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Agreed. To paraphrase someone from another forum, we all have cringeworthy moments from our past; it shows that one has grown as a person.

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Originally Posted by gimmethesimplelife

When I was 20 and dinosaurs roamed the Earth in 1987, my family in Austria paid my way over to Europe to visit them as they were worried about me growing up in the US. A party was held in my honor in the suburbs of Vienna by the sister of the husband of one of my Mother's best friends in Vienna. During this cookout, a guest there said something that haunts me to this day - The only good Jew is a dead Jew. I hate myself, really do hate myself to this day that I did not stand up against this....Today I would call out this evil. Without thinking twice. I was 20 at the time and amazed to be in Europe - for someone from my roots it was like winning the lottery to be in the Homeland - but this is no excuse. Today as an full adult I would handle this so much differently.

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You were 20 years old.
You were a visitor in a foreign country.
You were a guest in a relative's house.
You were the guest of honor at a party given by a friend of that relative.
The person who made the offensive remark was probably at least a few years older than you.
And they were no doubt a friend of the host/hostess.

Under the circumstances it would have been extremely rude for you to speak up and chide someone older than you unless the remark was made directly to you or unless you were going to say "I am a jew, and I find that remark very offensive."

All speaking up would have done is embarrass the host and your relatives, make you look like a rude arrogant clod, and cause a ruckus that would have left a lot of hurt feelings. It wouldn't have changed anyone's opinion about Jews or served any other purpose. IOW in such a gathering and at such a young age it simply wasn't your place to speak up if none of your elders saw fit to do so.

You should also put that situation into it's bigger context, which you were probably not fully aware of at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austri...onal_Socialism

Do you seriously think anything you said or did at that party would have influenced anyone else's beliefs or behavior? I don't. So quit beating yourself up about it. It's never wise to start a fight unless you think it's small enough to win and big enough to matter. That situation was neither.

I totally agree with George.

I agree with GeorgeParker, Rob. We all have moments where we think of the snappy comeback after the fact.

One time my DH had a business trip to North Carolina, and so we (my kids and I) decided to tag along for a mini-vacation. We were in the hotel elevator with a white gentleman. We went up one floor. The door opens, and a Black family gets on. The elevator goes up one floor, and the Black family gets out. The door closes and the white man says to us "Whew! Glad the stench is gone. I don't just hate n----s, I DESPISE them!"

My DH and I were so gobsmacked we just remained silent. To this day, I wish I could have come up with something appropriate to say, especially since his comment was in earshot of my young children.

I don't beat myself up about it. Nothing would have been gained by challenging this stranger in a hotel elevator. The only thing I could do was to ensure my kids knew how offensive that remark was.

Catherine, your family was not in an elevator with a gentleman of any kind.

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Originally Posted by GeorgeParker

You were 20 years old.
You were a visitor in a foreign country.
You were a guest in a relative's house.
You were the guest of honor at a party given by a friend of that relative.
The person who made the offensive remark was probably at least a few years older than you.
And they were no doubt a friend of the host/hostess.

Under the circumstances it would have been extremely rude for you to speak up and chide someone older than you unless the remark was made directly to you or unless you were going to say "I am a jew, and I find that remark very offensive."

All speaking up would have done is embarrass the host and your relatives, make you look like a rude arrogant clod, and cause a ruckus that would have left a lot of hurt feelings. It wouldn't have changed anyone's opinion about Jews or served any other purpose. IOW in such a gathering and at such a young age it simply wasn't your place to speak up if none of your elders saw fit to do so.

You should also put that situation into it's bigger context, which you were probably not fully aware of at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austri...onal_Socialism

Do you seriously think anything you said or did at that party would have influenced anyone else's beliefs or behavior? I don't. So quit beating yourself up about it. It's never wise to start a fight unless you think it's small enough to win and big enough to matter. That situation was neither.

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I like that... shouldn't let things (or people) that don't matter get under your skin. I will try to work harder on that.

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Originally Posted by frugal-one

I like that... shouldn't let things (or people) that don't matter get under your skin. I will try to work harder on that.

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I am a work in progress learning to do the same. Some situations/people make it really easy, which provides lots of good practice. :)

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Originally Posted by Chicken lady

Catherine, your family was not in an elevator with a gentleman of any kind.

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In Mere Christianity (1952) C. S. Lewis describes the deterioration of the word "gentleman" to illustrate what he sees happening to the word "christian". That is, the gradual slipping away of concrete meaning that changes a simple specific descriptive term into a fuzzy word that just means "nice" or "bad". And in 2021 "gentleman" doesn't even mean "nice" anymore, It just means "male", like the "gentlemen" sign on the restroom door. :(

This is what C. S, Lewis said about "gentleman":

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not "a gentleman" you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A.

But then there came people who said—so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully—"Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?"

They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man "a gentleman" in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A "nice" meal only means a meal the speaker likes.)

A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

catherine is just being polite ("gentleman"). It's a weird argument that language should never change in order to make things easy for (lazy) historians.

When I meet a couple of male walking friends chatting, I greet them with a "Good Morning gentlemen" just as I would greet a group of women chatting, "Good Morning, ladies" or Bom dia, senhoras" if they are the Portuguese group. 'Gentleman' or 'lady' are simply titles for everyday use, IMHO anyway.