Blog 452 – 11.01.2016

You say po-tae-toe, I say po-tah-toe. You say row-dee-oh, I say row-day-oh. It is just a matter of taste or a difference of style but so many folks buy into the hype that the world will end if everyone does not see it their way.

A few years ago I received a long term work assigned to the great state of Indiana. Though I had traveled there on business and to visit family several times before I had never spent more than a day or two at a time there. And as such I never learned much about the food preferences of the natives. As a boy, in Tennessee I grew up eating Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and did not know that people in Indiana have a favorite dish they call Chicken and Noodles and for beef lovers a similar dish called Beef and Noodles. I was thrilled the first time I tried the Indiana version of Chicken and Noodles only to find it just does not appeal to my taste.

Recently I found out that a dish popular in Mineral Point, Wisconsin called Cornish Pasty, also available in chicken or beef,  like the Indiana favorite dish is just not a favorite of mine. What is it about us that makes us that thinks it is wrong when someone does not share our preferences. That goes not just for food, but especially those three more sensitive subjects, religion, sex, and politics. And I would add sports as I have seen sports fans defend their team as if the state of the world depended on their performance on a given day or your equal devotion to them.

I have a practice in my travels of buying a sports cap in each new place I work to look more like a local. Oh, course when I speak my accent gives me away as southern boy, born and bread. When I first started my current work assignment in Wisconsin last May I bought a nice looking Green Bay Packers cap and the foreman on the work crew I was inspecting for at the time, himself a devoted Packers fan, said to me in all seriousness, “Don’t wear it unless you mean it.” Really!

I have seen this sort of scary attitude expressed on Social Media in many incarnation. It usually goes something like this if you don’t agree with my religion, politics, sexual expression or a particular opinion or view as I see it you can just unfriend me. Really? Is that the litmus test for friendship that we have to share the same taste, the same opinion, the same take on everything? No wonder we live in such a polarized society.

Like the illusion of control this illusion of complete and total agreement is a sad state of affairs. It even may be that in many cases your friends are just pretending to agree with you in order to stay friends. It wouldn’t be the first time people had to keep their preferences, their likes, their loves, their religious beliefs to themselves just to survive.

As kids we used to say, “Who died and made you God.” when someone held a particularly unyielding position. Lately there has developed a particularly nasty strain of intollerance that is unlikely to abate no matter what the out come of the election. Some will win some will lose but life goes on. We can only hope that the winners and the losers will come to understand that everything is not life or death but most things are just a matter of taste.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White