There’s this lady we see for a service that comes around annually. I’m pretty sure she would never venture on to Daily Kos, nonetheless, I’m not going to mention the precise service she performs for us. Can’t be sure it wouldn’t get back to her somehow. The particular service isn’t relevant anyway. What’s relevant is the conversation we had apart from the business at hand.
The first sign of trouble — while waiting for a long printout to finish, she casually mentioned that she listened to Trump’s state of the union speech and never felt prouder to be an American. Neither my wife nor I said anything in response. After a bit more ordinary conversation, she looked me squarely in the eye and said, “I’ve known you for a long time and value your opinion. What did you think of the President’s speech?”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment, trying to consider my response. I had never mentioned anything about Trump in her presence, so there was no reason for her to know that I had even heard his speech. Yet somehow, I couldn’t lie and say I hadn’t heard it. I began by saying that all the talk about great events in America’s past was well and good and I understood her being proud to hear that, but that part of the speech had nothing to do with Trump. As soon as he started talking about anything current and about any of his reasons for doing anything, every word he spoke was a lie.
She got this incredulous look on her face at me saying such a thing. Apparently, because my Scots/Irish ancestry makes me look so typical of our highly conservative community, she had always assumed that I thought like her. I never gave her any reason to think that by anything I ever said. She just assumed it by my silence whenever she said something I didn’t agree with, such as dog talking Obamacare. She doesn’t make much money and directly benefits from Obamacare by being on Medicaid, something she wouldn’t have qualified for without Obamacare. No matter. She’s still agin it. Anyway, when she asked me a point blank question, I couldn’t lie.
Once she recovered from my answer, she wanted an example of something he said that was a lie. I chose the relatively safe example of the supposed high crime rate in border towns turning into low crime rates with a wall. I told her he lied about the initial high crime rate. Neither of us had ever been to any border town and knew nothing about border towns other than what we saw on the news, so she had no basis for supporting Trump’s version of the situation. She admitted that she didn’t know much about most of the topics he spoke on. Her key issues were aborted babies and lurid tales of duct taped women brought across the border to be sold as sex slaves. Before I had considered what to say next, my wife stepped in and held a bit of a filibuster explaining how most of us have areas of expertise we know about and other areas we know little about. She went on with this long enough for both me and our lady to calm down and for our lady to tire of any further inquiries about how we felt.
My wife and I both think it was very unprofessional for her to ask our political opinions.
Anybody else been unexpectedly called on to express your political opinion by someone you’re seeing for business purposes? And is it worth the likely ensuing unpleasantness to be more forthcoming when others say things in our presence that we don’t agree with?