You Are Protecting a Score No One Is Counting

An argument broke out during my commute today. Two men were going at it hard in the crowd. One of them lost his cool and switched to his native tongue. The other had no idea what he was saying. He asked him to speak in a common language. The other simply couldn't. His language of anger was native. I could understand both, and I was quietly amused at this strange way of having an argument. Within minutes the intensity began to drop. One man kept speaking in his native tongue but the other couldn't follow a word. So he started laughing. Because the whole thing had turned absurd. As someone who understood both sides, I knew the man was saying genuinely vicious things. But since the other had no grip on the language, he couldn't engage with it. His mind couldn't process the words. Without words, it couldn't retrieve the readymade template of attack. You cannot defend against something you don't understand. His internal defensive mechanism never triggered. His bias never triggered. He…