Sometimes greeting strangers brings regrets. Other times however, they don’t.
As I sit at my favourite coffee shop and wait patiently for my bowl of noodles to come along, I sometimes find myself offering a seat to a stranger who happened to notice I was alone and had some seats to spare. I don’t mind sharing. Not a problem. Until that stranger starts talking about politics.
That’s when I regret offering this stranger a seat, and I wished I had just kept my attention to my smartphone and be like any other anti-social person.
The amount of hate, disgust and distrust these strangers pour out about a person they know little about makes the conversation dull because every word is negative and every expression from the conversation hits only one point, which is ‘the person is bad and you should hate him too’.
To re-inforce their statements, they tell me stories of them going into the kampungs and how their experiences have made them fail to understand why the village people keep voting for a particular party. It gets more interesting as they bring in quotes from popular figures into the one sided conversation, justifying every bit of information with proof they found on Facebook.
Uh wait, Facebook?
Yes. Facebook.
And then I find myself rolling my eyes and putting up a smile just to ensure I don’t offend these strangers, which most of the time would be older than myself.
For it didn’t matter if his facts were correct or not, because Facebook is indeed not the best source of information, especially when you are going to curse and judge the person without much mercy, while at the same time associating everyone linked to this particular person with stupidity and so many unkind words.
Irregardless however, I’ve learned my lesson to keep my opinions to myself when meeting strangers like this.
In the early stages, I did try to put my points out there, but you kind of just know they are not interested to listen to what I have to say, although I am really not taking sides and merely trying to point out that they should check their sources and not make assumptions and believe things based on what they see social media. – It is indeed a losing battle and I sort of know that whatever I say, it will not change the stand these men have over the matter.
So guys, tell me the whole situation I explained above is an isolated case, and I was just way too lucky to bump into different strangers who think alike.
Because if it’s not the case, perhaps I’d be better off starring at my smartphone most times I invite a stranger to sit by me.