"You're from N*ggerville!" he spat out. "Excuse me?" I replied. What I had thought would be a friendly game of cards was about to erupt into a profanity-laced shouting match. "You heard me!" he said, "You're from where all the n*ggers live!" Less than a minute into the match, I had just been asked by another player to tell him where I had grown up, and upon receiving my naive answer, he promptly launched into invective.
My response was somewhat more polite, but no less provocative. I told him to go screw himself, at which point he used my indignation as a segue into his Neo-Nazi beliefs, which he assumed everyone else in the room was somehow eager to be tutored in.
To this day I don't remember exactly how many insults were passed back and forth between the two of us. I only remember at one point a curious passerby asking what the problem was, to which another player ruefully replied "just two idiots fighting with one another". And upon hearing the stunning moral equivalence which had been established between a vicious, vile bigot and his prey, I chose to leave the room, along with whatever chips I still had under my name.
That was the last card game I ever played. Gambling was a nasty habit of mine to say the least, and one which I will not miss. If fate was trying to teach me a lesson, I'm happy to say that I learned it that day. But the more time that passes between now and those tense, adrenalizing few moments, the more two facts in particular stand out in my mind.
The first is that the Neo-Nazi I was arguing with did not have a personal gripe with me. How could he, being a complete and total stranger? The most likely motivation for his racist tirade was sociopathic in nature. He was trying to upset me, so as to place himself at a competitive advantage in our match. Failing at that, his goal was to drive a potential competitor from the game altogether, which he obviously succeeded in accomplishing. If I were Chinese, he would have called me a "ch*nk", and if I were gay he would have called me a "fairy", "homo", or some other horrible epithet. It was a purely strategic move on his part, with emotion playing no role whatsoever.
The second fact, which has been the real source of both anger and sadness for me over the years, was the moral relativity which everyone else in that room clung to. It has been said that the hottest corner of hell is reserved for those who try to maintain neutrality when presented with a stark and obvious choice. Just as a feral animal will do as its Creator designed it to, the haters of this world will always behave loathsomely. But a thinking, feeling, conscientious human being is another story entirely. Anyone who has been blessed with the ability to tell right from wrong has also been given a moral imperative to act upon that knowledge. And by lying to themselves, and reasoning that the Neo-Nazi and I were on equal moral footing, the few witnesses to our altercation were trying their best to absolve themselves of any responsibility to side with me against him.
To me, the card game served as a microcosmic example of how brutality sprouts, thrives, and endures in this world where evil is vastly outnumbered by those capable of doing good. It also demonstrates, to me at least, how the choice between good and evil is an eternal one, which we will be presented with regardless of where we are in this world or the next.
As for the men and women who I left behind in that room, I often envision them having been cleaned out by the demon in their midst, as divine punishment not just for gambling, but also for standing idly by as one of their would-be defenders was verbally savaged and driven from their presence. That would strike me as being the happy ending this woeful tale is desperately deserving of.
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