When People Try to Beat You Up With Words

Many people don’t like other people living outside the middle class mainstream and insist on telling you so. It’s trying when it’s not just annoying. I give examples in today’s column for Aleteia, When Men Speak of All That Is Evil Against You . . . and ask what this experience should teach Christians about the way they speak of others.

The column begins:

“When we decide to stop having hot sex,” one of Pia de Solenni’s multi-childrened friends answers when someone asks them when they’re going to stop having children. Another friend would say, “I don’t know. How much is in your bank account?”

Pia herself borrows this line when people ask her when she’s going to have a baby. One man, having asked for her and her husband’sprocreative plans and in return been asked how much money he had, complained that hers was a personal question. She explained to him that his was also a personal question.

We had only four children, but when they were small, strangers would accost my wife and many of those strangers were not just impertinent but vicious. Sometimes they offered faux-concerned questions of the prosecuting attorney’s type and sometimes they gave lectures, often with references to their own rectitude in having just one or two children. The people who did this were almost always later-middle-aged women and they almost always struck in the grocery or in a department store where she couldn’t get away from them.