Cowardice

David Sedaris wrote a piece long ago about being on a metro train with his sister. She was getting off before him and as she disembarked she called back through the crowded train and platform “Good Luck with that rape charge David!” People immediately stopped and stared and though he tried his best to dissuade them, he eventually had to get off and wait for the following train.

Later in the same essay he is on another train, this time on the Paris Metro with his boyfriend Hugh. Two obnoxious American tourists begin to discuss David’s hygiene in front of him, assuming him to be Parisian and totally oblivious to their conversation. He thinks of all the different ways he could embarrass them, things to say that would make them shrivel with embarrassment into a little ball and die.

I think I was channeling him last night. We were on the metro coming back from hearing Bill Bryson at the Folger, which was awesome by the way, and a woman got on the metro with a protest sign. The wording was such that I couldn’t really tell which side of the abortion issue she was on, but someone else on the train asked her and her complaint was that a bishop in the Catholic Church had not fired an employee (lay person, not ordained) because she had gotten an abortion.

I had to hold my tongue but there were so many things I wanted to yell at her! Like, the bishop can’t do that because it’s against the law! And, why don’t you keep your politics out of my uterus?! She kept referring to the “anti-lifers” and I really wanted to call her a Uteral Nazi. Then she started making racial slurs against “the Mexicans” and how they are all bad Catholics because they get abortions. I really wanted to yell and scream and hit this woman, or at the very least embarrass her beyond belief.

She eventually got off the train, and I wanted to yell after her “Good Luck with that Rape charge!” but I held my tongue. I’m just too much of a coward to start a rumble on the metro.

Still, that woman had it coming!