I'm not sure I understand anymore.
I'm not sure I understand the rules and what I'm supposed to do to be a good person.
It's Saturday the 22nd of July, about 2.30 in the afternoon. I've been into Nottingham on the tram to collect something, and I'm heading home.
I'm just sitting at the tram stop in the little shelter, and I've forgotten to put my headphones in. I'm just watching.
I like to watch.
Two sets of people descend towards the ticket machine simultaneously.
Please allow me the opportunity to explain what these people look like to me, even if it doesn't quite suit your sensibilities; I'm trying my best to be neutral here and to be reasonable and decent.
The first is a big guy, heavy set but not fat, dench my son would call him.
He looks like he's West Indian to me because he has big thick dreads and a beard, and he's cool, and when I hear his voice later, it confirms that I think he might well be of West Indian origin.
The other two are females.
One looks like she might be North African because I'd been speaking to someone from Egypt yesterday, and they have a likeness about them.
She's pretty pale-skinned but not white, so I'm unsure of her ethnicity.
The other is really white with red hair; I'm thinking Scottish or Irish.
Let's call the guy Colin (that makes it as easy as possible), and let's call the girl who might be Egyptian Catherine, and let's call the other girl Mary (like Mary from Catholicism).
And so, they converge on the ticket machine. It's a touch screen where you buy your ticket using your phone.
I'm watching this about 10ft away from me, diagonally opposite.
He gets there just a fraction before the ladies do, but it's tough to tell on reflection, but he doesn't stop and let them go first because why would he?
We're done with that stuff, aren't we?
We're done with holding the door open for women or insisting on paying for a meal because that's not equality.
We can't do that anymore.
The trouble with that is that some people still expect that because maybe that's the way they were brought up, the culture they were seen in, or their parents did it, I don't know.
It's still certainly ingrained in me.
So, I will always hold the door open for a lady if she's coming behind me because I'm built like that, and it's hard to shake now.
The trouble with that is that it could be construed as something that is not equal.
It could be a problem, so you have to call it kind of as you see it, and sometimes you might get it wrong.
Anyway, Colin gets to the ticket booth first, and he doesn't let them go first, but he's only fractionally before them but Mary says something to Colin along the lines of "Are you jumping in front of us?".
And so, that plays out in slow motion for me because I have nothing else to do, but watching the dynamic is fascinating.
Colin is mortally offended, and I'm not sure why he's offended; maybe it's because he thinks he doesn't have to let ladies go first now, or maybe he doesn't like Mary, or perhaps he's having a bad day, but it's hard to know what's going on from here.
It's worth breaking aside here because I'm going to tell you how the girls are dressed because I think that's important because I'm making a judgment about them.
They're kind of dressed a bit hippie, if that makes sense, like a woven multi-coloured bag and flares, and they look pretty liberal to me.
I don't know why I think that, but I'm quite good at calling people's characters and things by appearance; it's one of the things that makes me good at my work.
So, I'm going to say that they're towards left-wing, not right-wing, although I'm not quite sure why I know that, but they look quite liberal to me.
This is important because they start to exchange words with Colin, who's now pretty upset that they've called him out for going in front of them in the queue.
And so, he decides that this is an example of white privilege and starts to shout them down for being racist and engaging in white privilege.
This seems to be the worst thing that he could accuse them of. So they are absolutely mortified and horrified and start to try and argue in response and try to defend themselves and defend their position and suggest why they're not racist and why they don't engage in white privilege and why they're not verging on being a white supremacist (a term that Colin uses).
This plays out 10ft in front of me diagonally to my left for the two or three minutes that's left before the tram to Clifton South arrives.
I'm not scared by this, and I'm not really upset or affected too much, but I spend the rest of the tram journey, maybe 7 to 10 minutes, just trying to process what happened and think, how would you possibly navigate that situation in a way where it wouldn't blow up to be something disastrous?
What seems to have happened here is that two sets of people, one single and a couple, have arrived at the ticket booth at the same time.
I think the girls expected the guy to say you can go first and then he didn't, so they said something.
I think they said something, and that really upset the guy (who might have been upset before or may have had some terrible backstory).
He then accused the girls of being racially motivated in their comment, and then they were horrified because they considered themselves to be the opposite of racially motivated.
But partly what was playing out was the fact that there is a general feminist agenda which says you don't have to let girls go first or you don't have to hold the door open, and if you do, you can be seen to be anti-feminist, and now I'm really confused, and I don't know the rules.
I write this because it now seems like everybody has an opportunity to fall out with everybody else for any number of reasons, almost inevitably, all the time.
There is an alternative to that scenario where everybody involved in the incident, which happened at that ticket booth, is more reasonable in their approach and is more empathic and understands that the other people involved in that discussion/altercation have a story and a story to tell and that you don't know their story so you don't know why they might be upset.
I don't think we are civilized enough anymore or patient enough anymore to be able to deal with anything other than direct conflict.
I'm baffled.
I hope someone can help me out because I don't know how I'm going to navigate any number of situations moving forward.
Blog Post Number - 3516