Two Brief Stories: One Red and One Blue

In the early ’80s I was probably about 16, and watched a press conference given by Ronald Reagan.

Minutes before the press conference Sam Donaldson and a female reporter whose name I do not remember gave a brief introduction. The reporter that wasn’t Sam said, “You’ll notice that most of the women in the press are wearing red dresses. This is because it is felt that President Reagan is more likely to call on them to ask questions because that is his wife’s favorite color. You’ll also notice that most of the male reporters are wearing red ties for the same reason.

President Reagan, who was an affable guy and a great communicator if you were actually listening, came out and said, “Welcome members of the press. Wow, Nancy would never forgive me if I did not recognize that woman in the beautiful red dress first.”

There was nothing about that lunacy that didn’t sicken me to the core, but I suppose I do understand the power of charisma no matter how damaging it is to our most sacred institutions.

On April 1, 2017, there was a going away party for a friend of mine. He was a pivotal friend because he was the key to my interaction with a lot of people I liked and mostly agreed with, and a lot of people I didn’t really like and in no way agreed with on much of anything. After that day, I would have to make some effort to see any of them again.

There was a guy who had read a ton of books, I don’t know where he got them, but he had a lot of ideas about things. He felt he was not a Donald Trump supporter, but seemed to take great joy in my sadness over his recent inauguration.

So on a day marked for foolishness, I basically said to him, “I probably have never really listened to you before and been less than communicative to your ideas. Tell me anything that you believe and I will listen honorably and do my best to give your views their best airings.”

For some reason, he started asking me to define the color blue. “How do you know that blue is blue?”

I said that I couldn’t explain it perfectly, but that scientifically different colors were revealed in the light spectrum at certain times and that defined what colors we perceived. “No, I’m asking you how did you even come up with ‘blue’?”

I just listened to him for a while and waited for him to make his point. I always hated Socrates, but I did learn about Socrates, because I hated him. The Socratic Method to me is a bit silly. Socrates thought that there were smart people and stupid people, and that only the smart people were worth educating.

I kept waiting for my acquaintance to make some grand point. I gave him every opportunity, but he didn’t have one.  I knew he had these grand Rothschild Federal Reserve banking theories to slay me with, but they never  came. He merely kept saying, “you can’t define blue.”

At which point I thought to myself, “What have I done with the last 20 minutes of my life.”

I suppose that I can’t really say who was smart and who was dumb; who was educated and who was ignorant that day. I was polite and I did hear him out, but we didn’t really discuss anything of consequence. I did say to myself, “If I ask just about any toddler in America to grab me a blue ball from a hamper full of red and blue balls almost every one of them would bring me back the ball I wanted.”

I then decided, “If we can’t agree on blue, we can’t agree on anything, and I need to do everything I can to get this person out of my life.

I did and it was perhaps the best decision I have ever made.