"Political slop"

Tonight at work I shut down my register to go relieve someone for a break (which means I had to change registers) and I had 3 customers left in my line. Two of them were a couple, a young, attractive Indian couple, and the guy behind them, my last customer at that register, was a much older, weathered, really ugly old guy. The three of them were having some kind of really involved conversation among each other, so much so that I had to try to get their attention several times to have them swipe their credit card, sign for their credit card, etc, etc. Which is one of my biggest pet peeves at work. I fucking hate being ignored by customers.

Anyway, they continued talking all the way through my completion of the old guy's order, and the Indian couple finally bid farewell and walked away. I finished up the old guy's order, gave him his receipt, did my closing spiel, and closed down.

But the old guy decided he really wanted to talk to me, and turned to me and said, "That just proves my point."

Obviously, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I took the bait.

"What's that?" I asked.

"That all this bilingual education is a total waste of time and money."

Oh, boy. I didn't want to sit and listen to another conservative douchebag give me his big spiel. One day, while I was working at the information desk and couldn't escape, some old twat prattled on for about 10 minutes about "this Socialist healthcare that your generation has got to do something about!" Because her father and husband are both doctors, and you know what socialized medicine means? Rusty scalpels and doctors who don't wash their hands. And it was all poor people's fault. Medicare shouldn't exist, Medicaid shouldn't exist, and it wasn't her job to support families who couldn't afford healthcare.

I stood blank-faced and silent throughout, and finally she got bored and left, and I flipped her off behind her back. A double-fingered salute. Becoming an automaton and not reacting at all is the best survival mechanism I've thus far discovered for dealing with customers complaining about something retarded, which is about 98% of the time.

Anyway, I start walking away from this guy, not really acknowledging what he said, and the motherfucker just follows me.

He explains to me that since India has something like 33,000 dialects and he spoke Indian to that couple, but in a dialect different from theirs, they couldn't understand him. But then, lo and behold, when he spoke English they understood him!

You don't say.

This bilingual education is just "B.S. political slop," only created to give jobs to people who don't know how to do anything else, and he wondered when everybody was just gonna wake up and learn English, since clearly it was the dominant language.

And he would. not. shut. up. I wasn't even really sure exactly what he was talking about.

I was ignoring him. I wasn't looking at him. Yet he continued to run his idiot mouth.

Finally I turned to him and sternly said, "Yeah, I get it, will you please stop talking to me now?"

And yes, I really said that.

Then I turned back away from him. And he simply turned around and left.

If only all idiots were that easy to get rid of.

I'm sorry to make such a gross generalization, and I know there are a lot of lovely old people, but when my generation finally takes over this idiotic country, and everyone now that's over 60 or so finally fucking dies off, things are gonna be so awesome. I'm not saying my generation doesn't have some serious problems, because we do, but for the most part, so many things are such a non-issue that get old people all tied up in knots. Things like race, sexuality, immigration (for the most part), multiculturalism, gender, religion. And perhaps when we learn to get past that stuff, we can actually start talking about things that matter.

But to their credit it must be really difficult to make sense of things when nothing fits into the tidy little boxes of oppression that they grew up with.