Yates – Session 1 – 11 you’re dead set. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh every day, I, as a ten-year-old Democrat, am not going to come into your classroom and say, “Change your way of thinking.”
And just the other day, I was down at an event. It was like a fall music festival they were having down in downtown Battle Creek. And I got to talking with a guy, and I was actually with a dear friend of mine, Laura Adams. And Laura is a local photographer who’s African American, and she’s a Buddhist. And so Laura and I have a lot of things we share. We talk about Burma, and all the Buddhists there, and my experiences growing up, and all that good stuff. And she said, “Let me introduce you to this guy because you’re both into local history.” And the guy, of all things, he makes his living by collecting scrap out of the Battle Creek rivers. And I said, “Okay, as a pastime, I like to get into some history stuff,” and I said okay.
And we were talking about history and kind of local politics. And he goes and drops the N-word, and I’m like, “What?” I just couldn’t believe it. I was like no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s just not okay. But I said if I sit here and fight this guy, other than telling him like that’s not acceptable, if I fight this guy on this, what’s going to change? I’m probably going to get the crap kicked out of me. He’s bigger than I am. I will be a martyr for the cause—don’t get me wrong—but you can’t change people’s minds when they’re like that. You’ve just got to live and let live, I guess.
If somebody is dead set in what they believe, they have to change by themselves. Nothing I say is going to turn someone who’s a Republican to a Democrat or a Democrat to a Republican. So that’s kind of why I felt like I couldn’t have conversations as far as this is who I am.