People are weird. I know that’s a given, but sometimes it just pops out of nowhere and scares the bejeezus out of you. It’s those times that it can be hard to know how to respond.
I was taking a walk one night around my neighborhood. Distantly, over the hum of traffic breaking quarantine, I heard a man shouting at me from across the street. Concerned, I crossed over to see if he needed help.
He was an upper middle aged man wearing a particularly ugly red, white and blue sweater complemented by a particularly ugly little dog. Other than this, he seemed normal. Like someone’s grandpa maybe.
“You want to know something, kid?”
I was standing at least twenty feet away, and he had to yell to be heard. I didn’t know what to do, so I laughed awkwardly and nodded.
He started by telling me that the Coronavirus was a hoax created by the government to keep us indoors so they could implant chips in our minds and create global governance.
I probably should have walked away right then, but I didn’t.
He continued his litany, taking me through his beliefs that the entire democratic party was possessed by demonic spirits, how Hilary Clinton was in a satanic cult that tore the faces off of children, how 5g internet was causing people to get diabetes and die all over the world, and how in May, another solar system will collide with ours and send plasma beams down to burn forests. He also spewed some anti-semetic bullshit about snakes which I didn’t really understand.
You’re probably wondering at this point why I was still standing there listening to him.
I was wondering the same thing.
Maybe I was just entranced by what he had to say. Maybe I was just too polite to leave outright.
Whatever my reasoning, I stayed and played along.
I pretended to be interested in what he had to say, and nodded affirmations once and awhile. I gradually came to understand that this man genuinely believed what he was saying. It wasn’t just to cause drama or be spunky– he literally believed that Obama was a demon sent from hell.
That scared me.
I think that’s why I stayed. The fear.
He was a systematic failure. Our society had somehow allowed this man to fall into this quagmire of conspiracy. Not only that, he was ardent enough in his beliefs to be sharing them animatedly with an angsty looking teenage boy by the post office on a Friday night.
Even if I had had the nerve to argue with him, I couldn’t have empirically proved him wrong, which scared me even more. I can’t say for certain that Hilary Clinton isn’t a satanist. I could have told him it’s highly improbable, but what is probability in the face of this kind of blind faith?
So I just played along.
I felt a little bad afterwards, like I had maybe given him some sort of satisfaction. He had won. He had spread his ideas into a young mind. I let him believe he had. Hell, I told him I’d watch InfoWars. Will I? You bet your ass I won’t, but he doesn’t know that.
I guess I shouldn’t have let this get to me as much as I did. He was one guy, and clearly out of his bloody mind. I think what disturbed me more than anything was my own response to him. I didn’t even try to argue against him. I just politely nodded and egged him on. I should have at least told him he should believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity, but I didn’t even do that.
I guess I don’t know what the right thing to do in that situation would have been. Like I said, sometimes things like that pop out of nowhere, and all you can do is the best you can.