to tolerate personal violence or property destruction just because someone is offended by a symbol (inter alia, anybody can be offended by any symbol, so that slope is too slippery for my taste). And I concede in advance I have no idea how I would feel about certain symbols or, further, how I would react to certain ethnic groups if I were black or Jewish.

Back to attitude shifting with experience and some of the subject matter of this thread. My great grandfather, a professor of Greek and mathematics at Randolph Macon, fought in the Civil War, participating in every major engagement in the east save for Gettysburg. He was too busy herding some Yankee prisoners off to be confined.

After the war, fraternization with Yankees was completely prohibited for his children.

That attitude shifted with my grandfather. While he didn't prohibit fraternization, he did prohibit intermarriage. This resulted in a few oddities in the family. When his beloved daughter Mary fell for a man from Chicago (Illinois troops wore only blue during the Civil War), he proclaimed his son-in-law a midwesterner and blessed the union.

My fiancee is from Brooklyn.

A funny story (in a burlesque sorta way) about the first Jew I ever met (the Northern Neck of Virginia back in the 1970s, was mostly Baptist, with a handful of Methodists, and a light sprinkling of Episcopalians, and no Catholics, so religious diversity was close to nil):

Jerry (he was the local correspondent for the Richmond Times-Dispatch) and I were shooting pool in a rough lunch joint in the Town of Warsaw (so re-named out of solidarity with the people of the city of that name in Poland). Jerry was shooting pool like he was some character out of The Hustler, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and all that. So I was beating him like a drum. Jerry didn't care; acting out the shtick was more important to him than winning the pool game.

A gent named Caledonia knocked on the back door. His real name was Lawrence Taylor, but he had been severely shell shocked on the island of Caledonia during WWII. This resulted in odd psychological behaviors. He pushed--never rode--his bicycle to the odd jobs he did to make ends meet. If he was digging a ditch, there would be a grubbing hoe in the bicycle's basket. If he was cutting trees, there would be a chainsaw. And so on.

After he would finish the job, he would start pushing the bicycle home, stop at the first store along the way, and buy a bottle of wine, (reputedly) a bottle of aspirin, and a pouch of chewing tobacco. At the first nice spot, he would break out the wine, (reputedly, as it's thought to enhance the effect of the wine) dump the bottle of aspirin in the wine, and sing. Occasionally, he would pause for a chew of tobacco.

H, the proprietor of the lunch room, would sell Caledonia beer out the back door but wouldn't let him come in. On this occasion, it was pouring rain and Caledonia wanted to buy three six packs of beer and stand inside out of the rain. H agreed to let him stand just inside the door, but no further inside the pool room.

As Caledonia stood just inside the door, two other gents playing at the next table began making remarks about "the bum." As remarks got uglier, Jerry got increasingly agitated. Finally, Jerry couldn't stand it any more, pulled himself up to full height, and announced, "I might not be Christian, but that's not the Christian thing to do!!!"

I reversed my hands on the pool cue I was holding, thinking the situation could get ugly fast. H's lunch room was a rough place frequented by rough men.

Fortunately, the situation de-fused itself. H brought Caledonia's beer. Jerry and I put Caledonia's bicycle in the back of Jerry's Ford Torino and took Caledonia home.

Lawrence Taylor would not let us leave until he had picked two grocery bags of vegetables out of his garden for us.

[Post edited by Doug at 10/11/2018 11:12AM]