El Camino: Supplemental

Around 2am, standing on Lisbon’s famous Pink Street, a beautiful young woman in her mid-20s walked up to me.

We had made some quasi-flirtatious eye-contact a few moments before and now here she was, approaching me with two of her friends in tow.

18-year-old me would have been blown away.

She asked me how the club was I was standing in line for. I had no idea.

This was my first night out in Lisbon. I was moments from going home a few hours before, when I somewhat ~assertively~ took a picture of a nice Brazilian couple who happened to be standing picturesquely with a rising orange moon and the city of Lisbon as their backdrop.

They thought I may have been a scammer, a general healthy suspicion not withstanding, so I was adamant about taking a nice picture for them.

This silly interaction attracted attention of a fellow American nearby who struck up a conversation with me. 15 minutes later, he, his cousin and I were off galivanting around Lisbon. They were both in town for a third cousin’s wedding.

We checked out the thronged streets of Barro Alto, which to our disappointment skewed towards a younger and unsophisticated crowd. So, we meandered our way up and down the cobbled, hilled streets and found our way down to Pink Street.

Here was the slightly older, more professional crowd we were looking for. We waited in line, grabbed a few beers while we could and here I was approached by the blonde American beauty.

The conversation started off neutral enough, she asked me about the club and I responded in kind I had no idea but we heard it was the spot to go.

Then like a force of my own personal gravity, the way the various stars of the universe have their own pull in solar systems, I proceeded down a track to blow up the conversation.

Mind you, this is the first time I had spoken with Americans of roughly my peer group and not in the armed forces in about a year. With that caveat, let us proceed.

I asked them where they were from - a soft ball opener question.

Friend no. 1 (a female) said she was from Scranton, PA. Unable to contain myself, I made an off-handed comment about ‘Joey B’ and ‘A hard-working mill town’. Friend no. 1 exchanged looks with blonde beauty. Uh oh, blood in the water.

The next thing that happened was such an encapsulation of modern American politics (especially the online version) it cracks me up as I write.

Friend no. 1, in acting as the bouncer to blonde beauty’s inner circle, foisted a fake microphone (miming a man on the street interview that is now so ubiquitous on social media) and asked me “who did you vote for?”.

In an instant I felt a surge of various emotions. My hands are beginning to perspire mildly.

Years of various social-political interactions fueled by hundreds of hours of podcasts listened to, books read, ideas thought through and years of experience in the Army all fighting to be channeled through one portal that is my brain and out my mouth into something good to say. All that nuance and unique insight washed away by the awful reductive framing of one question:

“who did you vote for?”

So I reverted to a mildly childish dodge tactic. I threw it back at them. But no dice.

Without hesitation and with a strong hint of moral superiority, blonde beauty responds affirmatively “Kamala Harris”.

And admittedly, I lost my cool a little bit.

I sometimes get a low-level nervousness talking to women I’m attracted to, butterfly kind of stuff where I might stutter, blush or trip over my words. It’s gone away as I’ve gotten older, but it might come back every now and then.

But this political discussion being foisted upon me at 2am at a club, after a year long deployment very near to a warzone, in the form of a shakedown by two young women who’ve never, and probably will never, serve. I was a little pissed.

In an exasperated voice I asked “why on earth would I vote for Kamala Harris?”

And boom, the glove is thrown down and the vibe of the entire interaction changes.

Suddenly I am on the other team; sub-human, stupid, pernicious, with the bad people. A distance is instantly created between me and these three friends.

And lo and behold, friend no. 1 throws in my face “what about your boy Matt Gaetz?”. As if that guy is a one-to-one representation of exactly what I stand for and believe.

“My boy?? Who said Matt Gaetz is my boy? He seems like a scumbag.”

I have no idea about Matt Gaetz except what I see in the news, the allegations through headlines. Innocent until proven guilty. That being said I have never been nor do I have a desire to be associated with that guy. He’s a random congress person from Florida.

And for me, this was the deeply frustrating part of the conversation that is emblematic of the toxic stupidity of our entire political system and discourse.

Each side is reduced to the dumbest and worst version of each other, in ‘gotcha’ sound-bite memes. Just like our internet and news culture. Staged as some fake interview that I didn’t consent to. Amazing, just what I wanted on my night out.

But I have to take ownership here.

Because I’ve had similar conversations in the past of the same ilk.

People who I probably disagree with profoundly whom I meet in contexts that are less than cordial, or at least there’s no long-term social ties that need to be protected or are desired to be kept.

So I’ve taken the liberty of categorizing and dismissing these people as whatever suited me. And that attitude had come home to roost.

As I mentioned previously, this conversation made me realize how much psychological charge I’d built up around these issues.

Literally years of podcasts, books and experiences. And for the most part, people are also coming at it from the same level of complexity, volume and passion as me. And just as often, for various reasons, their beliefs are reduced to the most 2-dimensional version of the cumulative insights we have to offer to each other.

Not to mention all the bad faith, hot-take, biased, meme-ified sludge we (I) indulge in as a culture. It’s bound to take effect.

It showed in my tone, in my comments and the way I acted. I clearly felt some type of way and wanted to disagree passionately.

On the other hand I felt conflicted because:

one.) I was attracted to blonde beauty and she was at least mildly interested in me

two.) I don’t like fighting with people unless it’s martial arts or I feel they deserve it

three.) having been the ‘means’ to the ‘ends’ of high-level policy decisions, I am now far less invested in these narratives that pass as analysis and truth in lieu of what is happening on the ground. Often, they are at best distorted, and at worst deliberately concocted tools by the power-elite in order to manipulate large swathes of the population to achieve policy outcomes.

four.) *pearl clutching intensifies* I simply ~protest~ at the denigration of discourse. We have to be able to talk with each other about complex, difficult things and find common ground as citizens. I may be a Luddite railing against the introduction of power looms here. But the way the internet and media is eroding our way of life cannot continue without some sort of dire consequences. And maybe this discourse shouldn’t happen at 2am at a club.

I even said as much at one of the last junctures in the conversation.

Instead of falling into the frame of who did you vote for, I said something to the effect that “I don’t think old people should control or influence our lives that much”. I was met with some kind of scoff and a “what?”.

I dropped the point but I was trying to say that the politics of a bunch of boomers is not really something I subscribe to anymore, and I don’t think those politics should have been directing the abortive conversation we were having at 2am in Lisbon.

Finally our conversation concluded somewhat painfully.

I tried to make some sort of banal joke about us having to figure our political differences out for the future and “for the children”. In the context of Matt Gaetz and my now somewhat hostile audience it didn’t land. Almost couldn’t have gone worse.

According to blonde beauty and friend no. 1 it had become “painfully awkward” and we both began to turn away.

The other friend (friend no. 2) - a young dude probably in his early 20s - looked at me in sympathetic bemusement and gave me a pat on the arm. I smiled and gave him a collegiate pat on the back. I guess he might’ve saw something brave in this exchange.

Needless to say this was a bit of a bummer. It was the first thing I’ve felt akin to public humiliation in a long time. Or at least the threat of feeling so.

But this is where, once again, I need to step in for myself.

As I’ve tried to inculcate complete ownership in my own life through various examples; I brought on this interaction. It’s unpleasantness is within my locus of control.

To quote Marcus Aurelius “Choose not to be harmed – and you wont feel harmed. Don’t be harmed – and you haven’t been.”.

That advice is one thing to read on paper. But it’s another thing to realize it in the midst of a situation that at least ~felt~ potentially harmful. But I’ve realized through a lot of reflection, it wasn’t.

Though the interaction has bothered me, living rent-free in my head for a couple weeks after, it actually was a great experiment run in having skin in the game on salient issues.

I learned a lot. I had conversations about this interaction with at least three different friends or acquaintances. And in each subsequent conversation it’s proved extremely rich for reflection.

I spoke with it about a peer in a writing workshop who focuses on financial writing in India. She was quite detached, obviously, from US politics and the emotional valence was immediately reduced. She saw how both parties had strongly formed prejudices about each other prior to the interaction. This is where I recognized how much my previous content intake primed this interaction to go the way it did.

I spoke with an accountant/business management friend who loves Canada. He had a similar interaction but of a different result with a couple ladies at a coffee shop in Toronto. They were discussing American politics and he couldn’t resist the curiosity in asking them their opinion on US politics openly, which is now essentially verboten in the states. Even the Canadian ladies, though they didn’t like Trudeau, were glad my friend wasn’t from a deep ‘Red’ area.

I spoke with another friend, a Boston creative. He reminded me of “unquestioned assumptions”. Why did I even need to answer the question? Why accept the frame? The whole schtick? Real Jedi mastery would’ve been spinning that question around and complimenting them on their political convictions, fostering a space to maybe have some real dialogue. Or just telling blonde beauty she’s really pretty and I don’t wanna fight right now.

I remember too when I did a study abroad semester in France during 2021. I was freely and casually asked about US politics without any sense of my answer being good or bad. It was like gulping cold water on a hot day. I was able to simply offer a mildly nuanced response, (something like: it looks good here, looks bad there) and the conversation moved on without any sense of a kerfuffle.

And through all these conversations and reflections I come to realize I didn’t really vote for Trump.

Who I voted for was Tulsi Gabbard and RFK jr. What I voted for was *hopefully* an end to pointless wars, a scaling back of the surveillance state with veneration for civil liberties and an honest accounting of our health agencies, food production and improved quality of life as a country.

I want these things desperately and I often feel powerlessness to effect meaningful change in these domains. These people seem to me to be the best hope to steer the proverbial ship in the right direction. But of course, I don’t know if that will truly happen given the nature of the beast of politics.

If those ladies never understand that, I regret that, but it might be so.

Unfortunately our party system, the way it is, couches me into a ticket with some unsavory characters, sometimes in big ways. Politics is messy, unappealing and frankly I’m a bit sick of it. But it is a significant part of life. And we all have to find our own ways of doing the best we can in these arenas.

I also feel on the hook for any manifestations of ‘Orange Hitler’ coming true.

Though I think a great majority of that type of rhetoric is overinflated, hyperbolic and twisted, broken clocks are right twice a day. And Trump has said some wild, possibly foreboding, stuff more than often enough. It’s a real moral quandary that’s truth will only be born out in time. And we all have to navigate it as we go.

I could, and will, write so much more on this topic. Perhaps against my better judgement. But it’s such an intransigent issue it seems like the only way out is through. Or moving to Micronesia.

Either way, I’ll leave you there. Much love and thanks for reading.