When we moved into this neighborhood, an older man stopped by to welcome us, and we thought that was sweet. But, pretty quickly, it became clear that his agenda was warning us against the lesbian couple who lived across from him. He told us that “some people around here” were doing things “forbidden by the Bible.” I became very animated about my need to unpack this box in exactly the right way and said something about being really busy. But he went on spouting fundagelical (and false) talking points about homosexuality and Christianity, and put the cherry on the top by telling me, condescendingly, that he was an expert on the Bible, and willing to help me with it. That happened to be a point in my life when my ancient Greek was crappy, but manageable for the work I was doing (I couldn’t sit down and read Scripture in Greek because both my vocabulary and grammar sucked, but I could follow the arguments about translation in interesting ways), but I was furious. I said something along the lines of, “Oh, really, do you read Hebrew and Greek?” And he said, “No.” And I said something like, “Oh, well, I read Greek, but I’m always looking for someone who reads Hebrew.” He left. Chagrined.
I considered it a win.
As it happens, our son became really good friends with the son of the couple he hated, and so we learned that that bigot harassed that couple a lot.
He shares one of our last names, and lately we’ve been getting a lot of calls for him. We checked, and they’re scams. We don’t really know where he is (he might have moved, since the house seems to have had some remodelling), and we don’t really care. We had three choices: ignore the calls (it’s landline, so we can’t block), tell them they have the wrong people, or, what I did, since I spent much of today reading Hitler’s deliberations with his generals. I spent a day reading about how a guy who believed that what he wanted for himself and people like him merited the killing of 355 million people, so I was pretty much done with sociopaths who think they can make a buck this way.
I lost it, and called back one of the numbers and told the guy who answered the phone that I hope he spends every day of his life dealing with people like him, and that, when he’s old and vulnerable, he is the prey of people like him.
I was so enraged that I was completely incoherent and almost certainly ineffectual, and it was all in service of a bigot, but I’m still proud about it.
And, fyi, the numbers all seem to be 844 area code.