More idols than reality

It's a great thing to socialize, and I especially enjoyed doing it in these last few months when I had no work. So, if it wasn't for the language course - that I've been attending for about a year now -, then I wouldn't spend that much time with people.

First, because I finished work - when I still had one - relatively early, then just to keep the habit, I used to arrive there half an hour, sometimes even a whole hour before the course would actually start. And so have been doing many others, and we would spend that time with talking about whatever we'd pick up as a topic.

I found out that after our class had become bigger with some new members, and a few months would fly away, I felt less and less happy to be there early. Then recently, I realized it was probably so, because one of us, who obviously feels like being responsible for keeping the conversation alive, started to say rather annoying things.

I don't mean the stories he repeats again and again where others seem to be all assholes, while he, in some miraculous way, always comes out as a clever one. It's only becoming boring, but otherwise not so disturbing.

But, for instance, when they showed a movie in the same institution where the course is held, about how gay men who flee from humiliation and certain death in Palestine, are thrown back from Israel, he told us a story about how another man in a public bath tried to feel him up, whom in return he knocked out. And as the moral of the story he added, that his connection with homosexuality has ended then and there.

I personally don't think people can be changed, maybe influenced, but still it usually is like a very superficial thing, in my experience, at least. So, I didn't feel like explaining to him - in his late sixties or so - that being gay doesn't also mean that you're lurking around in public baths, awaiting your chance to harrass everyone passing by.

Nevertheless I appreciated it when a woman of his age said it's rather hard for gay people here in Hungary. Then I added, that I believe it is so everywhere around the world. She agreed that it might be so, but she knows how bad it is here. For which I said, yes, to make negative comments on homosexuals, full of prejudice, is just as fashionable here, as it is on Jews.

After some time the above mentioned man said he was sorry, and he didn't mean what he'd said that way. However, he proved it some other times later on, that he loves to call folks and things faggot, when he, for some reason or other, doesn't like them.

Not so long ago, when we talked about socialism, he said that it was safer both jobwise and in many other ways, especially with regard to social and health care. Then the next time we gathered he mentioned it in a rather worried way, that he wondered how much time it would take, before our country would be able to get rid of the bad influences of socialism, so that people could once again learn to stand on their on feet, instead of relying on protection.

Of course, there were both positive and negative sides of the previous political system, exactly as it is the case with the present one. My private opinion on the matter is, however, that there's never been socialism, here, at least. There was some kind of ideology, and then there was a corrupted system - not so unusual and different these days - where people tried to survive, all in their own ways, while holding others responsible for it.

It might very well be that he meant the same. I didn't ask him, being already somewhat insecure in how serious he is in all his ways of storytelling, maybe only for the sake of being the center of attention.

He reminds me a bit of my father who never ever mentioned it to me that he was a Jew. Then after my mother had divorced him, for our - the children's - sake, he left for Israel, where he married a war widow with three children, whom he raised up as his own. Thus he also escaped to pay family support-  to help mom with us, his real children -, which was actually not such a big sum.

As much as I am being myself, instead of pleasing someone else by doing something that is not me, and most of all, not living someone elses life, I do understand that people can be influenced from a very early age to suppress their feelings and thoughts, and so they miss to discover their real identities.

I am happy to feel free and unaffected of most of that stuff, while I don't believe I lack all kind of self-righteousness, at all. Instead, I'm still trying to understand people, and not judging them. But I have to admit, sometimes it feels like there's a wall between us, made of useless feelings on both sides, that keep us apart, and it builds but further misunderstandings and chaos in our minds, and in the world as we make it just the way we do.