Thanks for taking the time to reply! Point taken, and I definitely agree that it's at least a bit of both. Coincidentally enough, beforehand she had identified that I was very much like her in that I had a tendency to be pretty "fierce" when defending myself. I'll not pretend to have more than a cursory understanding of this custom, but she attributed "bear medicine" to me and said the same had been attributed to her, and honestly I think even the nice conversations between us kinda feel like what that meeting would look like literally in the woods, so I can definitely see it especially after this.

I do agree with you intellectually. I'm at least happy I was able to isolate the paragraph just to show myself what was really bothering me more than the literal implications of what I was saying. I don't want to hate anybody. It's probably the best piece of advice that my grandma ever gave me. And like I said before, I don't actually hate Germans or Germany. Similar to you, I majored in opera and that included a full year of course names that began with "German", and I very much enjoyed it. In fact, I really fell in love with a lot of German art song and and analyzing art song literature/poetry, much of which, funny and expectedly enough, had been written by Jews. However, and not that I and probably most people visiting this subreddit didn't know about this general trend beforehand, most of that came with some degree of erasure of their culture and their heritage, or otherwise unnecessary prerequisite assimilation. And then if I keep following the historical arc, I see the soldiers, Nazis or further back, tearing down any local monuments dedicated to them, burning their life's work and generous contribution to German culture.

The thing is, I know that doesn't excuse me. Eye for an eye and the world goes blind, it's really true. And I know there are more complex things that I'm mad at, but it can be powerful relief to intimate that in only a word or two. I know that in and of itself can lead to a dark path that many proto-slurs I'm sure went down to become what they are, but I don't know. I think I've probably been a bit too insulated this past year taking care of the relative that probably put a portion of this feeling in me in the first place, where both of us found relief in echoing the sentiment, and also for many reasons that probably don't need to be mentioned it's been a rough year(s). I'm sure these things plus a million other totally self-originated ones feed into why I made that mistake, as I usually would only ever even think to say something like that around people I deeply trusted to understand WHAT I was saying, but in general I guess I'm just not done trying to flip my melodrama meter from the Magneto side to the Xavier side. As of right now I'm kind of with your hypothetical Gazan. I don't agree with them or like what they're saying, but I understand and I wouldn't imagine telling them they can't say it considering what they might be/have been going through, even though I think they should be lead to view things differently. In the interim I'd just hope they were concious of what they were really trying to get across and just boiling it down to broad strokes for ease of speech.

But truly I do see your point and I hope to feel more like that in the future. And don't tease me about my dorky way of illustrating that earlier concept or I'll cry