I find it somewhat discouraging that liberals have managed to demonize something as harmless and useful as a pocket knife.
Recently, I was with my wife in a tourist area, and I sat on a bench while she shopped. I looked down and saw an unusual piece of wood on the ground, and picked it up and was turning it over in my hand when a young man (mid-late teens?) saw me pick it up. I saw him looking at it, and he said “What is it?”
I told him it looked like a knife handle that might have broken or fallen off of someone’s knife, and he looked puzzled. I said “Looks like a pocket knife handle.”
He still looked puzzled, and said “Huh. Who would carry around a knife?” and I said “Well, I do, I always have a Swiss Army Knife” and showed him. He said “I didn’t know people carried those around...”
He wasn’t making the face a liberal would make if you said you carried a gun, but general puzzlement that anyone would carry a knife. I felt kind of bad for him. When I was a kid, we all had knives. He didn’t know any better.
As I was talking, a guy in his late twenties or early thirties came walking up, looking fixedly at the chunk of wood in my hand. Our eyes met, and before he could say anything, I said “Is this yours?”
He said he had been sitting on the bench carving the knife handle I was holding (he sold knives) and it must have fallen out of his box when he got up.
It was a really nice handle. But it struck me how society frowns on anything like that now. What a frikking hot mess we are these days.