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Every once in a while on the Internet, I see a video posted from North America of a person of European origin freaking out on a Chinese person. The posting of the video is accompanied by a headline with the words "racist rant" in them. My immediate reaction is not of disgust as the posters of the video would like me to have, but instead one of sympathy for the ranter followed by curiosity about the circumstances that lead to the recorded incident. I also wonder if the Chinese person comes from the Mainland. Being in Mainland China as long as I have, I have observed the locals behave in ways that would strike North Americans and Europeans as appallingly rude. So many times I have seen the local Chinese cut in line, butt in line, smoke on elevators, spit, litter, cheat in traffic, use their horns impatiently, be impatient in other ways like not wait for people get off elevators or metro trains before getting on, be loud, stare, talk about foreigners in their presence, be stopped in places without regard for how others must proceed, shit and pee in public, be unsanitary, and so on... And much as I hate to say so, the Chicom authorities do make efforts to battle the unruliness of the Chinese masses, but it is the nature of Chinese to game systems and go through their days without much regard for others. Now the locals often seem to tolerate this behavior, but I have had many locals tell me that they hate seeing the behavior I have listed. So it seems that the locals who notice these bad behaviors are either too scared to say anything, or only notice the bad behavior when it intrudes into their normal day-to-day obliviousness to others around them.
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Well, if this is how the Mainland Chinese operate in Mainland China, who am I, an intruder, to complain? I tell myself this, but sometimes the behavior of the locals is so outrageous that I end up losing my temper my temper in the manner of those people who come across Mainland Chinese behavior in North America. Just this Sunday, I got so annoyed at a driver who cut me off that I honked my horn at him for a minute, and later swore at a local male who rushed into an elevator that I was trying to get off of. The driver didn't make a turn signal and the male nearly ran into me. I hate to say it but I have to confess behavior like this makes me think that I really hate Chinese.
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But I want to be a proper Roman Catholic Christian, and it was very disconcerting to me that my losing my temper at the locals during those two incidents did take place between bouts of praying and spiritual reading I was doing. Clearly I am neither doing enough nor taking a right approach in this goal. I do have to make contact with actual Catholics and find out what I should do about my problems with Chinese behavior.
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I don't really pay much attention to the Chinese media. Sometimes I do happen to see my wife looking at it. Recently, I heard some Chinese-accented speaker saying Trump was doing a bad job and it made my blood boil. I told myself I had to walk away from this. I am also getting this impression from the Chinese media reports that they are trying to convey this feeling that China has done so well in dealing with the virus. If some Chinese person asked me if I was happy to be in China at this moment in time, as I am sure they would like to, I would respond that I shouldn't care where am I in the world as long as I was acting like a Christian saint. My wife, sad to say, is being very pro-Chicom and anti-Trump these days. And my son Tony passed onto me a story that the virus originated in Seattle and not Wuhan. That is actually a plausible story because Seattle is one of the most Communist places in North America. If that is the narrative the Chicoms want to put out, I say go for it.
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I think Trump has been a doing a good job as can be expected under the circumstances. Certain writers I respect, who are inclined to be disappointed with Trump but don't suffer from TDS, have been saying he has been doing a good job during the crisis. However, I do fear that the economics of what he has been doing will have grave results in the years ahead. This bailout must surely be inflationary. All I can say in his defense on this score is that if the Democrats completely had their way, things done would have been much, much stupider.
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Bob Dylan just released a song about the Kennedy assassination. Here are two conspiracy that I have thought of to jokingly explain why and how the assassination happened. The first theory is that it was a Joe Biden cockup. Biden sent time travelers into the past (1980) to kill Trump. Trouble was, the killers were Russian and couldn't tell the difference between America 1963 and America 1980, and so they mistakenly killed Kennedy. (Jeffrey Epstein knew about this and so he had to be killed. Biden has talked about doing it but everyone has assumed he was blabbering.) The second theory is that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis did it. How could this be? You ask. Weren't they broken up by then? Of course. That was what everyone was told. So, a perfect cover for them to have a secret conspiracy. And have you ever watched the footage of them supposedly reuniting on Jerry's telethon? Their interaction looked well-rehearsed, a little too slick. And who was on the stage with them? Sinatra. And we know about the trouble he ended up having with Jack Kennedy. So why not get Jerry and Dean, who are supposedly not together, to do a conspiracy for him? Yeah. (I nod my head and stroke the whiskers on my chin.)
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The way Chinese drivers interact at controlled intersections says a lot about Chinese culture. Every time, I have to make a left turn in one, or just go through one, it has been a bit of an adventure because Chinese drivers won't stick to their lanes, turning Chinese drivers won't yield to oncoming traffic, and Chinese drivers creep into traffic making other cars swerve around them. No Chinese driver seems willing to do what it takes to make the place orderly and civilized. Their assumption seems to be that one else is going to do the right thing either. This explains why I haven't seen many stop signs in China and definitely no four-way stop intersections. There have been a few situations where lights have stopped working at intersections and the result is a quick grid lock because no one is willing to yield. I say this apropos of some traffic changes I have recently seen in my area. The local authorities have tried to make road traffic more civilized by putting fencing on the center lines of many roads in my area. They did have openings in the fences so that drivers on side roads could make left turns onto the main road and driver on the main road could make left turns onto the side roads. But these resulting T-junctions became gridlocked and/or dangerous because of the local driver's inability to slow down or yield to other drivers; and so the authorities decided to put fences in the openings to stop left-turning drivers from causing accidents. (of course that doesn't stop the right-turning drivers who don't look both ways before turning from snarling up traffic but that's another story.)
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My son Tony & I went to the downtown of Wuxi (we live in the 'burbs about 10 KM away) to get haircuts. While the place wasn't completely locked down; it wasn't back to what it had been a few months before. It was very subdued. There weren't as many people walking about in Sanyang Plaza and it was quiet.
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