A reasonable discussion implies the use of reason

Reason and logic my friend, go together like a horse and carriage. If we are not deploying logic, if we are saying I know what I am saying does not make any sense but I am going to say it anyway pretending it bolsters some point, then we are not having a reasonable discussion. If we are both exchanging opinions that we believe in just because we seem to believe them and haven’t given any thought to why we believe in them and don’t plan on ever doing that, I suppose we are having some kind of conversation like maybe you have with the guy on the next barstool when you are both loaded, but that is not a discussion.

The particular section of the southwest side were I grew up was extremely racist. It was nigger this and nigger that all day and night long, anything that went wrong, like the Kedzie bus only going as far south as 51st to the breaking of your shoelace when you knelt down to tie it, was routinely blamed on the niggers. Not that I was a paragon of virtue, but I was a big believer in science which clearly indicated that racism, whether you thought it was right or wrong, was stupid, it was like believing in a flat earth.

So I didn’t go for that stuff, but it was all around me, it rubbed off on me, and every now and then, usually some black person cut into line ahead of me or something, and I would be thinking, fucking niggers. But then I had to stop myself, Good Sense Uncle Ken from his perch on one of my shoulders would wag his finger at me, and I would have to admit that what I had said was wrong.

And so it has been my whole life long, and now distressingly as I age not so gracefully I guess, I find that that racist thing is coming more and more to the fore. They say old folks are less tolerant than young folks and maybe it is true.

But still Good Sense Uncle Ken still steps in and corrects me everytime one of those stupid racist thoughts pops into my mind. I could just say well I guess I don’t like black people just because I don’t like black people, but I don’t because I know it is stupid, and I can think the thing through again and realize that it is still stupid, and I never, no never, say to myself that that is just my Internal Sense of Right and Wrong and let it stand.

There is a book, and they made a movie out of it which you can sometimes see on probably TCM, A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullough, which is set in the south, and at one point the young girl at the center of the story thinks about her nanny who had in her youth gone to Cincinnati and seen snow. It just seems so distant and exotic to her. Strange to think that something so commonplace and mundane to us would seem exotic to others.