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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (75659)	9/26/2003 2:00:16 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Tell me what I changed. Okay. From my perspective: Your original post (75489) said that you wore "casual" clothing even though you knew others would be dressed up. So clearly you inferred that your attire was distinctly distinguishable. Otherwise, what's the point of the hypothetical? The wedding was clearly formal, since you knew everybody else would be wearing suits and ties and dresses and high heels. So it wasn't a casual wedding, but presumably one in a church with brides maids and all. A traditional, formal wedding that the groom's mother has probably been planning and looking forward to for months, inviting out of town guests, having a pre-wedding breakfast at her house, etc. Fancy stuff. If this were a 60s beatnik weeding, that's one thing. But from your description, it wasn't. Then you say the bride's family "would have been expecting my attire." Again, the only reason for saying that would be if the attire was going to be something significantly out of sync with the other guests. You say "The rest of the guests, however, were surprised." The rest includes not only the groom's mother, but everybody other than the bride's family. In some weddings that could be several hundred people. If that many people were surprised by your attire, again, it must have been something distinctly different and surprising. You say "And the groom's family was quite distressed at how I could be so disrespectful and insulting to the principals." Not just one person, but the family, which by implication is more than just his mother. And your attire was sufficient to be deemed insulting. You say " I showed up in my usual attire." I interpret this to mean what you normally wear now that you're retired -- what you wear lounging around the house on your Tempurpedic bed, what you wear to WalMart, to the grocery store, to take your car in to get the oil changed, to the pool, etc. I go to those places, and frankly not one person in a hundred in WalMart is dressed in clothes I would consider suitable for attendance at a formal wedding. So as you originally presented it, you might not have been a bag lady, but you looked as though you had just come from getting your oil changed or doing your grocery shopping. You were not the least bit surprised that all the guests except the bride's family were surprised by your attire, and that at least some of them considered it insulting and disrespectful. If you are fairly presenting the scenario, you were substantially and intentionally underdressed to an extent that was noticable and noticed by a substantial number of guests, not just the groom's family. And then you ask "How should the parties have reacted to me?" Not should they have reacted -- your attire is sufficiently unconventional that it needs to be reacted to in some way. All that presents a scenario of someone standing out quite decidedly from the rest of the guests in a way that all the guests consider surprising and the groom's family (not just his mother, but his family) consider offensive. Yet in a later post you write about the outfit "What I had in mind when I wrote that was my actual usual attire, which is a color coordinated, usually black, cotton knit pant and tunic top, black cotton pant socks, and a black loafer. Except for the shoes, Auntie's outfit would be indistinguishable at a distance from the pant suit you suggested save for the fabric,... " IMO, such an outfit is not consistent with the description you gave of an outfit which aroused surprise in most or all of the guests and outrage on the part of the groom's family. I think you substantially changed the scenario. That's one way. Another one is that while you do say in the original post that you have a belief in comfortable clothes as a key to a happy life and that brides and grooms would be better off if they wore those to weddings, you didn't anywhere use the word "conscience." Nor did you indicate that you were dressing that way to make a point to the couple; rather, the implication was that you were refusing to dress up yourself to satisfy their desire to have a formal wedding. If you were really so concerned as to have a position of conscience, shouldn't you have said something earlier (you presumably got a wedding invitation well in advance of the event) to encourage them to have a "comfortable clothing" wedding rather than just showing up with obviously no advance warning to the groom's family. I mean, by then it's way too late. If you really had a belief of conscience that their marriage would be a better one if they wore comfortable clothing at the wedding, why didn't you at leaset indicate that concern BEFORE they all got dressed up rather than after? That's not much of a position of conscience to me. The whole scenario sounds much more like this is my personal belief, and I'm going to go in comfies, but it's not to make a point to them because there IS no point to make at that point in time. One can have lots of beliefs that have nothing to do with conscience. But later you go back and make a big point about how you were making a point of conscience (without havign used that word) and trying to make a point to the wedding couple when you knew perfectly well that it was the wrong time to raise tha point (unless you were expecting all the guests to rip off their uncomfortable clothes and change into comfies right then and there). So I don't think that point was reasonably part of the initial scenario, though now you present it as the main issue. Those are a few of the ways in which I think you substantially changed things.