MEANWHILE...

... back at the Cafe Zinc.  Lunch time.  Ellie and I share an egg salad sandwich.  At the next table--have I told this story before?  I have not, but it sounds familiar--two women of respectable age, one of them with a distinctly British accent.  Irresistible!  Of course we embark on a conversation.  She's an even older immigrant than I, having left the old country with her GI husband in 1956.  (I crossed the pond in 1962, and have returned since only for visits.)  We enjoyed a friendly chat, with the growing sense that we were like-minded folk and could share our views...

It was Ellie who started telling the story of our Russian friends, from a couple of days ago.  His rage.  His hatred of Obama.  Then our new friend said, "Well, of course I agree with what he said."  That there's no difference between Obama and Osama?  Well, she wouldn't go quite that far.  But is it not obvious that Obama hates Jews?  And hates white people?  Did she really believe that?  Of course.  Isn't it obvious?  Not to me.  What makes her think he hates Jews and white people?  It's what he says.  He makes no effort to disguise it.  Hmm.  I find it hard to believe that she hears such things in what Obama says.  Does she listen to him?  No, she's too disgusted to even listen to him.  She did listen to him at first, but not recently.  But he's an enemy of Israel...

And so on.  We should not be surprised.  We are, after all, in Orange County, California, one of the most conservative in the country.  Even so, this is Laguna Beach, a small enclave of liberal thinking, and it comes as a shock to hear people talking in this way.  I was writing just yesterday about unreason.   So I sat there trying to make some sense of it all while she went on, and failing miserably.

Then I came home and found Chimmy's comment on my earlier entry, inviting me to take a look at the story of her friend Glennon's encounter.  "There is hope," she wrote.  (Or he--I have no way of knowing whether Chimmy is a he or a she.  Fun-loving, though, I'm guessing.)  So I followed the link and found myself reading this entry in a blog called Momastery.  I beg you to read it, start to finish, because Glennon provides the perfect model of a successful communication between left and right.  Where I simply goggled in disbelief, Glennon engaged.  Admittedly she had a little more time to do so, since she was on an airplane flight and her interlocutor was the angry man in the seat adjacent to hers.  But, as she tells the story, she managed to find the compassion to listen and get past the rhetoric to the basically good man behind it.  It's a marvelous story, and she tells it beautifully, without haste, allowing it to unfold and reveal an important truth without self-righteousness or rancor.

So I say bravo Glennon.  I aspire to your empathy and compassionate humanity.  I have yet to discover more about your charitable organization, Monkee See, Monkey Do, but I plan to do so.  And I have already added your website to my blogroll, and I trust that this entry may inspire a few others to check in.  And thanks to Chimmy for alerting me.  As she noted, with the evidence of such intelligence and good-heartedness, there is hope.