A piece of my mind.

Once a month, Rey and I go to an dinner group of which she's a member. Every month, on a Friday night, after we've finished our meals, five members get up to give a ten-minute speech on the topic of the night - each member gets a go about every six months.

I've been eating with these people for several years now, and I get along pretty well with them; I'm a lot younger than most, but until now that hasn't mattered. And they're basically nice people.

And I didn't have a problem with the speeches last week, either (except for the one that went on for nearly eighteen minutes for the sole purpose of telling a rather lame joke.) It was the dinner conversation between the people to my right. Who, as it turned out, really were to my right. You can probably guess the topic...

"Who cares if we're hurting innocent people? They hurt our innocent people!"

And more like that. I kept my mouth shut until the clincher:

"It's not our fault if Afghanistan can't handle its own internal problems."

And at that point, as much as I'd been trying to avoid this conversation, I felt duty-bound to turn around and politely explain that having the USA and USSR fight a proxy war in your country for ten years, followed by the inevitable consequences, is not an "internal problem".

These are basically nice people, but sometimes I wonder what planet they're from. It's not the things they don't know that bother me, it's that they don't even feel the lack of that knowledge.

So, after three years of resisting Rey's inducements to become a member - public speaking scares me very much - I've finally decided to join. Not to overtly lecture them on politics; that would be discourteous, and counterproductive. Just in the hope that by talking a bit about the planet I come from, they will realize that it exists, and maybe one day they'll be curious enough to learn a bit more about it.