It’s A Small World. Full Of Assholes.

A long, long time ago, one of my kids had a friend who, for Ghawd Alone knows what reason, felt it necessary/appropriate to interject the declamation “Jew” into his conversation, at intervals, for a purpose that I could not discern.

I mean, it was “Jew…” this, and “Jew…” that.

Finally I had had my fill. I invited the lad to sit, and brought him up to speed. “So, Name, you do realize my wife’s maiden name is Goldberg, right?”

He had not so realized.

“And, her grandfather escaped Wherever-ia, just ahead of the Nazi death camp round ups, didja know that?”

Again, he had not so realized.

“Furthermore, Name, under the laws the Nazis used to define who was a Jew, and therefore bound for Treblinka, or not, my wife, and all my children are Jews, and would be on a cattle car bound for death. Do you suppose that I might not think kindly about that sort of plan?”

He supposed that I would not be fond of that sort of plan.

“So, Name, consider that there are folks right here in America, who think that the Nazis had a pretty good idea, who think that the Jews who populate Israel ought to be wiped out, every man, woman, and child of them. Those folks would likely plan that my wife, my children, would be headed for the ovens. You should know that, while in all likelihood my family would be wiped out, I would be dead, in a large pile of spent cartridges, surrounded by as many Nazi motherfuckers as I could kill, before they killed me. Now, just how happy are you to be associated with that sort of asswipe scum?”

He stuttered for a bit.

Finally, he took a deep breath, and said, “I…didn’t…mean anything..by it..sir. I’m sorry.”

I smiled. “Think, before you speak. Thousands of men died, stopping assholes who believe, in their bones, the sort of foolishness you have been spouting. More will die, should that shit pop up again. Some of them will die atop heaps of spent cartridges. Others, fighting with clubs and bricks. But they would rather die with assholes blood on their hands, rather than in a trench or an oven.”

To his credit, the boy never, ever, again, in my hearing, used that particular turn of phrase.