The hard part is knowing when you’re really standing up against the Nazis to protect the Jews and when you’re just picking nits like the guy who irked you.
Agreed. And the Nazis/Jews are a good example of the pitfalls, because it wasn't a swift power grab. Things in Germany never radically shifted one day while a madman took over the country. No, it was an extremely gradual thing in which citizens failed to notice the little things happening day by day--or maybe not even that fast, maybe month by month, or less--and slowly handed over their country and culture to a lunatic and his band of thugs.
I tend to err on the side of caution, by which I mean I'm generally not one to keep my head down and hush up. I'm always trying to figure out what issues might be truly harmless and which ones could be problematic and we're just not seeing it yet. Talking about it is my way of engaging and muddling through it to arrive at an opinion, and that sometimes makes me tiresome to the live and let live/head down crowd.
I bet a guy like you would never eat at Bikinis with a guy like me.
It reminds me of when I was a teenager in karate lessons and one of the teachers would do this exercise from time to time, I forget exactly what his point was. He would get in stance and kind of do the boxing dance/hop with mildly exaggerated motions with his shoulders, fists, everything....and your job was to defend yourself. He didn't do anything past your skill level, and when he would strike, you tended to handle it pretty well. And then he would reach out a hand much slower, no faster than you'd normally reach for something, and it never failed for the people who hadn't seen it before.....unimpeded, he'd push us violently and knock us on our ass. Something about how when your brain is in the mode of looking only for the quick, overt, vicious strikes, we were fine. When something much slower happened, it confused us, like "surely something else is going on here, this can't be an attack," and I made zero effort to evade his arm. On the ground I wondered how that sumbitch had just waylaid me in about the dumbest way possible. I didn't feel any less dumb when I saw it keep happening to other people, only less alone.
