Genius and Irony – by Bart Stinson

I commute weekly to work at a very large out-of-state company with a lot of employee breakrooms, and a unionized workforce that bids on its job schedules and break areas, based on seniority.

There is no systematic or involuntary segregation and no discernible unfriendliness but, over time, birds of a feather tend to flock (and bid jobs) together. We have recurring Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Filipino, Dominican, Black American and Egyptian zones within the organization. I get assigned to replace absent employees in various work areas, so I work and take my breaks with all kinds of people.

I overhear a lot of conversations, but they’re usually not in my language. Last week I was in a mostly-Black American breakroom, so I actually understood what was being said.

Although our company pipes CNN television news into its customer areas and employee breakrooms, there is surprisingly little political conversation, so far as I can tell. These are hardworking, sun-baked people, many of whom have second jobs. Their political attention is episodic, and they often rely on the mass media or conventional wisdom for their opinions.

But sometimes they surprise you. There was a very interesting exchange between a glib and provocative young Jamaican immigrant and his U.S. Black co-workers last week. It started out as a pretty stale argument about gun control and Americans’ hasty resort to violence, then moved into a remarkably sophisticated discussion of our Constitutional protections, and the Founding Fathers.

The Jamaican scoffed at the U.S. Constitution. He said he couldn’t respect any document written by slave-owners like Thomas Jefferson. I expected nods of agreement around the room. Earlier, one had spoken of his sense of loss and grievance because, due to U.S. slavery, he didn’t know his grandmothers’ names, and knew nothing of his ancestors’ language or culture.

But these gun-owning American men weren’t willing to jettison their Constitutional heritage, either. They kept their eye on the ball, after all. One picked holes in the Jamaican’s bombast with a series of probing questions.

If Thomas Jefferson had invented fire, would the young Jamaican refuse to heat his own food? If Jefferson had invented cars, would he refuse to drive? What if slave-owners had invented the cure for leukemia? Would he deny his daughter treatment? That would be pretty silly, but no dumber, and no more tragic, than giving up your Constitutional rights and protections.

People who work hard for everything they’ve got, like these men, and who have to replace whatever gets lost, get pretty good at not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Prim, eternally offended soccer moms and Millennials may profit by their example.