Question about a chat I had with a student from Singapore

We were talking about a book I read in college, and she quietly said, 'We could never discuss that openly at home, the government would call it a threat to harmony,' which made me realize how a simple book club here is a radical act there.

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3 Comments

nancy_davis5mo ago

That "threat to harmony" line is chilling, I just listened without judgment when a friend said something similar.

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loganburns3mo ago

Flip it around and think about what happens when someone DOESN'T listen. That person your friend confided in might have been carrying that alone for months, sitting on it until it boiled over into something worse. A guy I know from church got cut off by his whole family after he quietly admitted he was changing his mind on something. Nobody listened, nobody asked why, they just shut him out. Now he doesn't talk to anyone about anything real, and that silence is way more dangerous than a clumsy confession over coffee. Sometimes the threat to harmony is the echo chamber itself, not the person who finally breaks it.

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the_ryan5mo ago

My book club in Portland once spent 20 minutes debating if a character's sweater was blue or green. Really threatening the social order there. @nancy_davis has the right idea, just listening. Meanwhile I'm over here, my biggest political risk is arguing about paperback versus hardcover at the library sale. Puts that "threat to harmony" thing in a pretty harsh light.

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