Why not, Pinetop? Puns stick WHEREVER they hit. *G*

One group I participate in regularly is the Hash House Harriers. For anyone who's not familiar with us, "Hashing" is a worldwide running and drinking club. We call ourselves "the drinking club with a running problem". *L*

Unsurprisingly, in a group this wide-ranging, there are lots of people with lots of different opinions about different topics: politics and religion are, without a doubt, the two touchiest subjects. In my local Hash, a very similar disagreement arose recently, and it was handled with the irreverence and humor that we tend to apply to everything.

Description of the incident and what lead up to it: One Hasher (who I'll call CC) is male and pretty strictly a hard-right conservative; he's also a fairly new Hasher, just under a year. Over a period of several months, CC had been making snide political remarks on our local e-mailing list. The other Hasher (who I'll call SL) is female and rather middle-left liberal. She had taken the first few in good humor, but as CC's remarks continued, she got fairly tired of them. (Many of the rest of us did, too. We just didn't do anything about it.) After one such snide comment (no worse nor better than any others), she retaliated. She went into the archives of the list and culled all the remarks he had made. She listed them in one message and responded to each ... from HIS point-of-view ... and turning the response slyly personal. One or two might've been actually hurtful, but SL's response to something over 100 such remarks turned into such overkill that no one could've possibly taken it so. I happened to be with CC when he read the e-mail (I had seen it an hour or so earlier). After reading the first couple he turned to me with a rather hangdog look and said something like "I didn't mean anything by it, just having a little fun." But by page 5 of about 8, he was ROTFL.

Hashers *tend* to avoid these sorts of topics. Religious and political discussions are ONLY tolerated when both parties to the discussion understand that nothing will be taken personally ... and nothing will be MEANT personally. Everyone understands that you get into such a discussion at your own risk. So most people simply avoid the topics.

Recently one of us announced that he was leaving the area: he's moving to the Big Apple to work for a Nader Raider-sort of radical left television company. Even the conservatives congratulated him: everyone proud that one of our buds would have the courage to strike out for what he believed in (even if it wasn't something THEY agreed with).

This kind of *tradition* of understanding our differences takes a long time to develop. Hashing has been around for about 60 years. But it will ... IF everyone agrees to try to work things out calmly, without allowing personalities to intrude, and always with a sense of humor foremost.

Hmm, I've rambled a bit here. Did I actually make sense? Probably not. (Hashers say that "if you've got half a mind to try the Hash, that's all it takes." *L* I qualify handily.)

BB (and ON-ON),
NightWing