Comment on You can drive 74 hours and still be in Germany. The American mind can't comprehend this.
Wolf@lemmy.today 5 weeks agoI don’t think it’s a matter of ‘can’t figure it out’ as much as ‘don’t like change’. We’ve been putting them roundabouts in my shithole state and the number of people who complain about them boggles the mind. They will successfully navigate them, but they’ll whinge about it the whole time.
This happened to me just the other day as I was chauffeuring some good old boy around. Mind you he wasn’t even driving, but still had to let it be known that he disapproved. There was no traffic so I barely had to slow down to navigate the intersection and his input was “I hate these things, they just slow you down!”. I tried pointing out that if it had been a 4-way stop we would have had to stop, so it was actually faster this way. I don’t know if he was immune to logic or just unwilling to admit that something that was different than what he was used to had a benefit, but he just repeated that he hated them, so I dropped the subject.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
You said they were a (presumably white) old American dude, so I would wager that it’s all of the above.
Wolf@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
Yeah, he was a cracker. Here’s the thing though, in other ways he seems like a perfectly normal and decent human being.
We passed by an Amish produce stand and he had me stop. He got a bunch of fresh Veggies and then we stopped at a Chinese restaurant where he went inside and gave the lady working there a bunch of them. As we were leaving he even had a short conversation with her in Chinese. I’m sure it was very simple things like “Have a good one” and “Goodbye” or something similar, but I thought it was cool he had learned it. That kind of thing is pretty rare around here.
In the car he was telling me how they had recently lost one of their children in a car accident. It was heartbreaking. Sounds like he has known them for quite while.
He then had me drive to a neighboring college town that has people from all over the world come to go to school, so it’s a fairly diverse place. He was telling me he liked it there because there were so many different kinds of interesting people. We stopped by his Dry Cleaners which was also ran by Chinese people and he left them with the other half of the vegetables.
Then on the way out of town he had me stop at the International Market. He asked me if I had ever tried Eel before and when I said I hadn’t he bought me a couple of cans (it’s ok, nothing to write home about imo).
So yeah, he was an old white redneck, but he wasn’t a total piece of shit and fairly open minded about some things. I’m not sure why he hates roundabouts, but that attitude is super common around here, among all sorts of people.