So What?

I was on the metro platform on my way to meet my friends in a pretty famous rose garden on the eastern edge of Paris when I noticed a man staring at a sign on the wall. It was a regular eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper whose bold English typeface declared that the editor in chief of French Vogue is a transsexual, and provided a website that allegedly proved this accusation. The man who stood in front of it was a classic professor type, complete with tweed jacket, thick glasses, and a comb-over. After contemplating the sign for a few minutes, he took a pen out of his pocket and scrawled "so what?" on the sign, returned it to his pocket, and sauntered away.

This man certainly didn't resemble my preconceived image of someone who would deface a metro flier, but he was nonetheless compelled to point out the irrelevance of what was posted. I found it to be a really refreshing display of the French tendency to launch into argument in the face of a personally bothersome phenomenon. Far from the crudely scribbled swear words and disembodied genitalia that usually decorate the posted material in big city public transportation systems, these two simple words stimulated a thought-provoking discourse. Maybe the editor in chief of French Vogue is a transsexual. Maybe there are websites to prove it. But who cares? And why does this information warrant a boldly displayed, albeit homemade, poster in the Parisian metro? Aren't the accomplishments of this highly successful person more notable than his or her gender?

It is nice to see people call out closed-mindedness in a public forum, to see an old man so unsettled by ignorance that he feels the need to mark it as such with two powerful little words. Perhaps the most effective way to become more open-minded is to constantly ask "so what?" and to encourage others to do the same.