In my Substack yesterday, I told the story of being verbally abused and then slapped outside of a 7-Eleven. I had worn an IDF (Israel Defense Forces) t-shirt on my walk, and someone whose sympathies lay elsewhere took violent offense.
I want to make two additional points.
First, I grew up in a culture where it was normal to wear political gear out in public. I wore a Carter-Mondale button in fourth grade, and was mocked for it. (“Jimmy Carter will make all the boys wear dresses,” said one classmate.) It was normal, too, to put political stickers on cars. Before the 1976 Democratic primary, mama’s Ford Pinto boasted a Mo Udall emblem on the back bumper. (We were not concerned about harming the car’s resale value by festooning its rear in political statements.)
People put up lawn signs, as they still often do, and we joked about them. In high school, I went to a friend’s house with a Reagan-Bush sign on the lawn. I knocked, and the father answered. When I introduced myself, the man grinned. “Oh, so you’re the famous socialist! I’m impressed you could walk by that,” and he gestured at his lawn sign. I gave him a grin, and said something self-deprecating that did not come out quite as well as I would have liked.
Put simply, I grew up assuming that everyone knew that while politics did matter, and they were important, they were never an excuse for incivility. We sported rival buttons and bumper stickers and lawn signs with the same geniality with which some in the family wore Stanford red and others wore Cal blue. You wanted your side to win, but you also knew that your passions and convictions should always take a back seat to maintaining relationships.
I stipulate the obvious: to view politics in this way is a function of privilege. As I made my way out into the wider world, I noticed that some people got really, really angry about politics. I was told, repeatedly, that outrage was a manifestation of both awareness and empathy. Anger was the correct response to the Great Crime, while civility was complicity. Manners themselves were designed to neuter the prophetic spirit of revolution. I tried to believe that, for a while, but it never took. As I’ve said before, being polite isn’t a mask that can be removed. It isn’t a coat that can be hung up on a hook for the sake of a riot or an argument. Politeness is skin. It is bone.
Wearing my IDF shirt was, in some ways, a betrayal of one of my key values: don’t provoke people. If I believe, as I do, that anger is one of the most unpleasant and unhelpful of human emotions, then wearing a garment liable to prompt anger is unkind. To paraphrase Scripture, it is not nice to cause a brother or sister to stumble. And when that man struck me in the parking lot yesterday, he stumbled. I suspect he was aware he had fallen short of his own mark, but felt powerless to resist the provocation I wore.
As I wrote, after he hit me, I stood my ground. It’s a lifetime of training. I did not throw the punch he might have expected. My attacker then went across the parking lot, picked up my glasses, and handed them back to me — adding that additional “fuck you, faggot” as he did so. I had been, as they say, “bitch-slapped,” the modern equivalent of a glove across the face. When I refused the terms of the proffered duel, he gave up. Perhaps he gave up because he realized that at some point, whether I called them or not, the police would arrive, and it was unwise for a young Black man to be found beating up a middle-aged white guy in broad daylight. Perhaps he remembered that he had been raised to be better than this. Perhaps he felt that he had made his point, and having made it, he retreated, offering a final volley of homophobic and anti-Semitic vulgarities.
Many people who share my views on Israel have told me I should still wear the IDF shirt. Those who do not share my views mostly have said that they are sorry it happened, but are glad that I intend to put the shirt away. As I said, I am putting it away chiefly because as a dad, I cannot risk getting seriously injured by someone who is goaded to violence by a symbol. If that’s a concession to the mob, as one friend put it, it’s one of those concessions I need to make. Wisdom over valor, etc.
It isn’t just fear, though, that has led me to rethink the shirt. It’s recognizing that I do not wish to be the sort of person who provokes outrage — not because I’m worried about getting slapped or worse, but because provoking outrage is unkind. Outrage is not a virtue. Anger is not pleasant, it is not necessary, and it is never as efficacious in achieving justice as the enraged imagine.
Call me a fool, but I am convinced that the man who struck me now regrets it. He hasn’t changed his mind about Israel, but I just have this feeling that he is frustrated with himself that he lost his cool. He knows on some level that he disappointed his mama and his ancestors. To the extent that my shirt goaded him into that loss of control, it was an unnecessary provocation. The IDF doesn’t need me to wear their emblem; I can still support the Zionist cause without causing another human being to fall woefully short of what it means to be civilized.
I’ve sent an extra $36 to the Friends of the IDF, and I have decided that the offending shirt will now be worn only in bed and around the apartment.
My second point: in my post yesterday, I wrote: I thought of all the angry students I’d dealt with over the years, including the furious young man who had discovered I was sleeping with his girlfriend. A friend messaged to tell me that by adding that sentence, I was completely undercutting the power of my story, using my past as an exasperatingly unnecessary distraction from my argument. It is true that I feel compelled to insert regular references to my old life into my writing. It is, as the kidlets say these days, a “weird flex.” It’s a mixture of self-flagellation and bragging, and it’s certainly compulsive.
Just as I can quietly support the IDF without wearing the t-shirt, I suppose I can scribble a Substack without reminding everyone yet again that I was once an attractive young professor who slept with many willing students. I must sound like poor old Andrew Aguecheek, pathetically observing that he “was adored once, too.” That’s not a good look.
If the goal is to avoid provocations, then I must reconsider both my wardrobe and my writing.
IDK. sporting political drip without danger is just so fundamental to American culture. Like freedom of religion, freedom of belief, thought, freedom to be that asshole with the Che Guevara shirt is what makes (or made) our country so attractive. It scares me to think we live in a time where we ASSAULT each instead of having a dialogue to test the debts of what you think is true. The freedom to be totally wrong and zealous about it, to move through ideologies without threat of physical harm.
I responded to this in an email to you.