which_chick | (no subject)

I had a discussion with my mother during one of the opera intermissions. This wasn't the discussion about tenant Scott's gay porn and how modern porn, with the aid of Photoshop and retouching wizards, is better than real because basically her contribution to that conversation was to cover her ears and go LALALA, I can't hear you. *sigh* I think there's some very valuable stuff to be learned from the Ken-and-Barbie plasticity of modern porn, but she was having none of it. This was the discussion about ... well, I don't know precisely what it was about, but I got the general impression that it was about me being a bloody-minded idiot.

See, a couple of months ago, I rented an apartment to tenant Shaun. I'd gone to school with tenant Shaun and he was not particularly a good kid at that time. He set fires to things and got sent away to juvie hall, but hell, I hadn't seen him since he was fourteen. It's been twenty years since we were fourteen. I figured that perhaps Shaun grew up and maybe became a more responsible member of society. I'm not the same person I was at fourteen, after all, and I reasoned that half of the crap he got into back then was maybe because he was a bit put out about growing up as that blue-eyed nigger amongst bigoted rednecks. Honestly, wouldn't that be enough to put you off your feed? It would me. (Note: I am not making this up. When we rented to him, the other tenants complained to us that we rented to that blue-eyed nigger. My aunt SJ and my father also referred to him thusly, though never in his hearing. Apparently that's what passes for polite in these parts. *sigh* I guess it's a start.)

So anyway, I was a fucking idiot and tenant Shaun didn't pay the rent and played his music really loud at night and parked inconsiderately and generally irritated and intimidated (because, y'know, of the black thing) the other tenants. He did not, I feel moved to point out, sell drugs out of his apartment. The only people we've had who have done that are white. Anyway, we evicted him and took a hit of eight hundred dollars or so on rent we aren't ever going to see. That's about par for an evicted tenant.

My primary difficulty with the whole thing was that my mother felt I was a fucking idiot for harboring the (apparently) completely irrational hope that a person might have changed in twenty years' time. I asked her what she would have had me do instead, refuse to rent to him because he had a hell of an adolescence twenty years previously and because everyone in town referred to him as that blue-eyed nigger? She didn't have the cojones to tell me Yes, you stupid girl, that's what you should have done, and you'd be eight hundred dollars richer now because that would mean that everything I was ever taught, as a child, about the possibility of people to change themselves was pretty much a handful of warm cowflop. (Mom, I feel moved to point out, votes Democrat. She's way, way more liberal than I am, or at least she claims to be.)

I allowed as how, if I cut off the possibility that people could change, cut it off at the knees, didn't that make me the bigoted fuck that she was always accusing me of being? Honestly, I don't see how I could have won, here. If I refused to rent to tenant Shaun, I got to be the bigoted fuck. If I rented to tenant Shaun, I got screwed out of eight hundred dollars and, adding insult to injury, got to be stupid in my mother's eyes. *sigh* People who believe that folks have the right to self-determination, people who believe that people can change, people who pay excellent lip service to those fucking liberal ideals... should not be standing there condemning me for being fucking stupid when I walk the damn walk. There's a word for people whose lip service to the ideals doesn't match their behavior on those questions in real life. (And no, it's not Republicans.)

I do not wish to cut off the possibility that people can change. I just don't. If that means my mother is going to go through life thinking I'm a fucking idiot, so be it. *sigh* She already thinks I'm a total pervert, so I guess this isn't much worse. In my world, people can have another chance, a fresh start, the opportunity to prove that they're not who they were in high school. Of course, there is no sense being a complete patsy about it. One second chance is quite enough. We will not be renting to tenant Shaun ever again.