Wednesday, February 11, 2015

It Takes Very Little Brain to Find Fault, Opines the Monroe Enquirer, 1920


“Just to Make Conversation,” from the Monroe Enquirer, February 1920

Some one said recently that the current idea of polite conversation seems to be to complain about something. It is a fact that if the complaint was cut out of so-called polite conversation there would be a great deal more of good, golden silence than there is.

The servant problem, by those who do not need servants, what a wonderfully wide field of conversation that is.

The high cost of everything, by those who have never produced a morsel to eat or a thread to wear in all their lives, that’s another golden opportunity to talk and say nothing.

And then there is the weather, which God Almighty made according to his own wisdom, infinite in its scope and not according to the wishes of the little its who put up a whine if a much-needed rain spoils their plans for a joy ride in an automobile—that is a fruitful subject for the whining, fault-finding conversationalist.

And the fault-finding conversationalist is found not only in the ranks of “sassiety.” You will find in the hotel lobby, at the drug store corner, in the court house corridors, and around the stove in the grocery store, the fellows who have never read a line of the peace treaty, and who know nothing of the plan of the plan of the league of nations, except as they have caught it from the big headline of the newspapers, cussing out Wilson or condemning Lodge for their attitude toward the peace treaty or the league of nations.

It takes very little brain to find fault.

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