In Another Man's Shoes

 I sat at the edge of my bed, not for the first time, ruminating on a scene from All In The Family. If you are familiar at all with the saga of the Archie Bunker and his clan in 1970's Queens, you know that there is a certain amount of vitriol that comes with most of those episodes. Later in the series, attempts were made to humanize the outsized bigot played by Carroll O'Connor. The moment I am recalling is from one of those attempts.

Archie and his "meathead" son-in-law get locked in the back room of what would become Archie's Place overnight, and the expected challenges of mixing oil and water play out over the course of the evening. Much of the friction is played out in the familiar conservative-liberal dynamic that took place anytime Mike, played by Rob Reiner, and Archie were together. Then there was a point when Archie is watching Mike put on his shoes. Archie insists that no one puts on one sock, then one shoe, then the other sock, finishing with the other sock.

"Oh? How do you do it?" Asks a flabbergasted Mike. 

Archie explains that in the event of a snowstorm, if he were interrupted, Mike's way would have him stuck with just two socks, hopping around in the slush. If you did it the proper way, Archie's Way, you would put on one sock, then one shoe, and if you were rushed outside at this point you could hop around on one foot and stay dry. 

It is here that the interaction turns. Archie describes the process by which he came by his method. When he was young, his family was poor, and he had one shoe and one boot. This made the distinction even more clear. He doesn't stop there. He goes on to briefly describe how the kids used to tease him, calling him "Shoebooty." This brief reverie is broken when Archie catches himself being wistful, and goes back to haranguing Mike. He takes another swig from the bottle the two of them had been sharing and stomps off to find a place to lie down to wait for morning. 

A moment or two later, Archie has passed out. Mike walks over to his sleeping father-in-law and pulls a tarp over him to keep him warm. "Goodnight, Shoebooty," he says, then looks for his own place to collapse. 

And the reason I am haunted by this scene is that I imagine that every one of the closed minds of those bigots and hard right conservatives must have their own Shoebooty moment. They just never had to spend the night with Rob Reiner in the back room of a bar to let it out. 

Sometimes I put on one sock, then one shoe just to remind myself of other perspectives. No matter how uncomfortable it makes me feel.