Bumpersticker Wisdom

Via the Analog Kid comes this entertaining account of what happens when you travel through hippy-land with one of these stickers on your vehicle. [Hat tip: Kevin at The Smallest Minority.]

She went into a rant about how violence creates violence, war is for people who don’t know how to negotiate (or some such BS) and I was waiting for the famous “You can’t hug a child with nuclear arms” drivel, but it never arrived. It probably would have except that as she got a couple sentences into her rant, I started unfolding my Shotgun News and that really made her mad.

Her last line something like “And stupid stickers like that one and stupid people like you will never understand and that really pisses me off!” and it was at full volume, so that folks still sitting in their vehicles around us were able to take notice.

I calmly folded my my Shotgun News back up and asked if it made her pissed off enough to try and hit me.

She said, and I quote “No, because you probably have a gun with you right now.”

RTWT and bask in the irony. 'Tis a thing of beauty.

Though not nearly as funny, this reminded me of an encounter I had with a roommate's boyfriend when I was at UC-San Diego several years ago. He was a sociology grad student who claimed to be a Quaker and was opposed to violence in all forms, yadda yadda. We were all at Denny's one afternoon having an interesting chat, wherein, among other things, he informed me that America has no culture of its own, so you can see what kind of person I was dealing with, but anyway... when the subject of guns came up I said I was all for them. Being a chick -- and someone who tends to wear stuff like linen skirts, which throws pacifists off -- he assumed I was kidding and laughed. I told him I was a member of the NRA. He laughed. I opened my wallet, took my NRA card out and showed him. In about 1.3 seconds the smile disappeared, his face turned purple with rage, and he lunged at me. He couldn't get to me from across the table, so instead he let loose with a litany of curse words that would have made a sailor blush, and I'm thinking this isn't a very peaceful person. I don't know if he was going to hit me or grab the card and tear it up or what, but either way it didn't strike me as very Quakerly behavior and I had no idea what to make of it. I was young and inexperienced, and this was the first time I had ever encountered a person who acted in total contradiction to what he said he was. Taught me a valuable lesson. Incidentally, years later, I would encounter another screaming Quaker -- this time a faculty member who was piqued over the 2000 election. But, you know, I can sort of sympathize. I might be inclined to scream a bit, too, if my worship services consisted of sitting in silence for an hour. Yeeearrrggghhh!