Once in a rare while, someone tries to engage me, usually in an intelligent and articulate fashion, about why I ‘need’ an ‘assault weapon’. Years ago, I would have tried to reason my side of things out with them. Perhaps in some naive country-mouse way I think that a light will go on in their brains and they’ll say “Gosh, you’re right. I never considered that.”
Yeah, no.
In addition to that particular would-be argument, I also get the ‘do you really think that [type of TEOTWAWKI] is going to happen?”
Again, there was a time I’d lay out my reasoning in the hopes of causing the other person to come to the same conclusions I had, and welcome them into the fold. Welcome to the world of survivalism, here’s your complimentary tinfoil hat.
Again, no.
Guys, you do you and I’ll do me. If you want to try and evangelize, proselytize, witness, preach, or otherwise try to convert ‘the others’ you are, by Crom, welcome to do it. However…and this is strictly my opinion, YMMV… give it up. The time to convince people to learn how to swim was before the ship hit the iceberg. You warned ’em, you offered to help teach them, and all they did was tell you the ship was unsinkable and that you don’t need that life jacket anyway. The time to try and save these people is long past. Stop spending energy on them and leave them to sink or swim as best they can, you’ve got to find a path to the lifeboats and you don’t have time to convince people that they need to head towards the boats as well.
Is that enough with the Titanic metaphors?
Look, here’s the real deal, sans cloudy metaphors and analogies – there are three kinds of people in the world right now: those who agree with what youre doing and support it, those who neither agree nor disagree and do not purposefully interfere with what youre doing, and those who disagree with what youre doing and are actively trying to hamstring you. Work with and value the first, respect but ignore the second, and stay the frak away from the third.
Stop worrying about other people who aren’t important to you and focus on the ones who are. Its a wild ride we’re on these days and there’s no room in our lives for people who are working against us.
I’ve covered this before. Our lives are too short to waste resources (time, money, emotional bandwidth, tears, trust) on people who are, intentionally or not, working against you.