The importance of being right
July 29th, 2002 | by Brian |This weekend I may have stumbled upon the answer to why all this political activism is so important to me. A friend of mine, Kevin, was in town for a wedding, and after a hike up at Flagstaff, we went to get some burritos. I said, in trying to figure out what’s important in my life, to imagine what I’d look back on, when I’m much older, and be proud of. Kevin says that maybe it would help to look back now. So I put my brain on “search mode” to observe what comes up. And, oddly enough, I think of one Sunday morning in Sharples, the dining hall at Swarthmore College, during the Spring of 1996. I figure this story is not really significant, so I tell it to Kevin, thinking that it would be an anticlimax:
I’m standing at the bagel cart looking for the bagel I want, and once again this girl is there. Yes, “this girl”, the one who touches a whole bunch of bagels before taking one. I’d told someone about her before, who since then referred to her as the “Bagel Bitch”. That morning, I’d had enough, so I turned to her and tell her, in so many words, that I don’t approve of her bagel picking habits. I can’t rememner what I said exactly, or how she replied, but she became all defensive and angry, and walked away. I get my bagel, toast it, and find my seat in the “Middle Room” booth with a friend, to whom I promptly related the story. A few minutes later, the bagel woman walks up to the table and apologizes! She said “You we’re right…” That pretty much made my day.
After telling Kevin this story, I add that I did not think that this was really relevant to our conversation. He replies: “Oh, no, I think it’s quite relevant.”
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