{"id":1084,"date":"2004-06-24T15:17:26","date_gmt":"2004-06-24T22:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=1084"},"modified":"2004-06-24T15:17:26","modified_gmt":"2004-06-24T22:17:26","slug":"speak-softly-carry-a-big-stick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2004\/06\/24\/speak-softly-carry-a-big-stick\/","title":{"rendered":"Speak Softly. Carry a Big Stick."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>It’s post midnight at a bus-stop. The buses don’t take off that often, and judging by the schedule, I missed the previous bus by a few minutes and have to wait an obnoxious amount of time for the next one.<\/p>\n

I’m standing with 3 other young men. An artistic type– the kind who eschews all television– a neighbor I see occasionally on the street, who creates his own clothes… he wears a small top hat. His slightly more culturally-in-tuned friend. And a third individual, on the other side of the bus stop.<\/p>\n

The two discuss their late night bus-stop encounters with crack addicts. “So, he runs here… all paranoid, and goes into the corner, hiding behind me. I turn to him and say ‘Go away.’ He fidgets about, and it takes three demands for him to leave for him to leave.”<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting conversation. I, myself, have on a few occasions accidentally thrown some signals to drug dealers and drug users. I must remember to modify my walking behaviour.<\/p>\n

Along comes a guy, a decade and a half older than us twenty-somethings, waving a stick (seemingly from the bottom of a chair) in the air. “Hey!” He turns to the artistic type. “You support the troops?”<\/p>\n

“Um.”<\/p>\n

“‘Cause you gotta support the troops.”<\/p>\n

“It depends on what you mean by the question. I don’t support war… like, ever. I guess<\/i> I support people who feel strongly enough to… well, I hate the government’s action and I’m forced to differentate some things.”<\/p>\n

“That’s cool.” The man walks ahead, still waving his stick in the air.<\/p>\n

“Well, that was scary. But, seeing as he had a stick, I’m glad there wasn’t a wrong answer.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s post midnight at a bus-stop. The buses don’t take off that often, and judging by the schedule, I missed the previous bus by a few minutes and have to wait an obnoxious amount of time for the next one. I’m standing with 3 other young men. An artistic type– the kind who eschews all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-ground"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}