It occurred to me today that everyone has a voice, and I don’t like it.
I don’t know how it used to work. I guess I wasn’t really paying attention much. But, I have noticed how it is working now, and it is not a good thing, IMO.
Before I go off on the way things are (and what I dislike), maybe we should look back for a bit.
The advent of the printing press is said to have assisted in the dissemination of information. Previous to this, books were of significant value, since each individual copy of a book represented the work of the individual who had to copy the original book, by hand, for someone else to have a copy. The only books that were ever copied were those that contained information of the utmost importance.
As a matter of fact, Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press to Europe, rarely printed books. The only book he ever reproduced repeatedly was the Bible.
Herein, there is a system of control. Things that ought not be printed certainly aren’t going to be printed because the work involved in doing so is significant, to the point where the effort to be wasted is valued more than the drivel to be printed.
And society seemed to work well like that for a while. It got to be a little easier for those who wanted to print something to have it printed for others to read, as time went by. The advent of the internet has allowed for a boon in self-publishing, where people can take upon themselves the work of writing and publishing a book, without having to have a publishing company agreeing to do that work.
But, throughout the time that has passed between Gutenberg and now, the amount of effort necessary to have your thoughts printed has gone down, and the tools for making something publicly available have fallen into the hands of the common people.
Any Tom, Dick, or Sally can publish information these days –> it’s called… THE INTERNET! And, because it isn’t as hard as it used to be, we’ve opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of the written word.
I shudder to think how many books it would take to contain the daily posts of every Facebook user? How many books to record all of the tweets from Twitter?
Additionally, these social media posts are ideal for your average American because they are A) short, especially designed for people who can read but don’t like to do so, B) posted by people who we either know, or we feel like we know, or we blindly trust because the social media platform tells us to, and C) the posts tend to correspond automatically with what we already believe to be true, so we aren’t ever moved by intelligent argument or witty repartee to accept a viewpoint other than our own.
I guess I’m an elitist. I don’t know when it happened that I became an elitist. I’m not even sure that I’m upset about being an elitist. I think that there are people who are better equipped to create and publish material for public consumption than others.
In other words, I have certain people who I believe should have a voice, and others that shouldn’t. When people from the latter group speak, I are more likely to ignore them. When people from the former group speak, their words have weight and consequence.
Do we really want EVERYONE to have a voice? The obvious answer is, “Yes, of course we do. This is America.” But, let’s take that out as far as it will go.
***The guy on Twitter who is trying to insert himself into a conversation but can’t spell any of the big words (more than three letters) in his comment –> he gets to have a voice.
***That woman on Facebook whose heart is filled with hate, who never has a nice thing to say to anyone, who you would mute if you didn’t have to remain in contact –> she gets a voice.
***The people in positions of power over us who use that power to do stupid things or hurtful things and we are all currently powerless to stop them –> they get their voices.
***The people who spread lies on purpose to see which gullible individuals will be caught up in the lies –> they get their voices.
I’m not sure how you would ever get the cat back in the bag on this one, since we are now at the point where everyone who can type can express themselves and those expressions often get the same audience. I don’t think that’s right; it shouldn’t be the case that everyone gets the same audience. People without the credentials shouldn’t be able to spread their viewpoints as widely as those who are proven to have legitimate opinions.
This goes back to the publishing process that existed prior to the internet and social media. People who had illegitimate things to say thirty years ago were going to have a hard time finding a way to widely sew those seeds since publishing companies weren’t likely to sell those printed words back then.
I guess, philosophically speaking, multiple viewpoints are often a good thing. The power that the internet and social media could have in bringing together multiple viewpoints for a discussion of different ideas could usher in societal breakthroughs, but I don’t see that happening now. What I see is that this powerful tool is more often being used for ill than for good.
The other issue here is an audience issue –> when people use the internet and social media to disseminate their opinions and ideas, it becomes the responsibility of the audience to intelligently consider the sources of those opinions and ideas, rather than just allowing themselves to be spoon-fed. But, your average lazy American probably isn’t going to do that work, and the people who publish lies on the internet know this.
It occurred to me today that, at some point, we started to become adversarial.
I live in Michigan, which means that I have plenty of friends who are Michigan fans. They ‘bleed maize and blue’ and they chant “Hail to the Victors” and they have ‘Go Blue’ bumper stickers on their vehicles.
I am a Notre Dame fan. I grew up a Notre Dame fan. My father graduated from the University of Notre Dame. I graduated from the University of Notre Dame. My wife and I are season ticket holders at Notre Dame Stadium.
Most of the time, it isn’t really a problem living in Michigan and being a Notre Dame fan. Most of the time, unless, I end up in one of ‘those situations’.
Chances are, you’ve been in one of ‘those situations’ as well. The situation where you come face-to-face with someone who is going to make an issue out of your membership in the ‘other’ group.
Here in Southwestern Michigan, the confrontation usually goes something like this:
“How can you be a Notre Dame fan? You live in Michigan.”
“Yes, I do live in Michigan, but Notre Dame is a half-hour drive from here, and the University of Michigan is a two-and-a-half hour drive from here.”
“So, you like Notre Dame because they’re closer?!?!”
“Among other reasons.”
“Oh yeah?!?! What other reasons?”
“Well, I graduated from Notre Dame.”
Etc., etc., etc..
What happens in this conversation, a conversation that I’ve had, literally, dozens of times, is interesting to notice.
The first thing to notice is the reasoning that we offer to explain our membership in a group. Sometimes, the reasoning is obvious: I’m in the male group because I have a penis, or I’m in the white group because I possess very little melanin. These are group membership reasons that make sense and have, historically, required little discourse.
But, when we belong to a group whose membership requirements are looser, then we must explain ourselves and the logic behind our group memberships. For some, the fact that I live in Michigan and root for Notre Dame doesn’t make sense, so I end up having to explain myself.
The other interesting thing to notice, when we are talking about us & them, is the ‘entrenchment’ that seems to happen. We prepare ourselves to occupy our position –to defend our hill– in the event that we end up getting into a ‘scuffle’. Why do we do this? I think it’s because we are preparing to defend our pride.
When we invest a part of our identity in one of these social constructs (our favorite team, our political affiliation, our race, our gender, our religion, etc.), defending that association becomes a part of defending who we are. When our associations are less significantly integrated with our self-concept, defending these when they are attacked or questioned becomes less important.
Additionally, people who tend to be proud people are more likely to be goaded into adversarial banter. Humble people find it easier, in general, to avoid the bait of the trap.
Who’s better? Michigan or Notre Dame? While Notre Dame has more football national championships, more Heisman Trophy winners, more consensus All-Americans, more College Football Hall of Fame members, and more NFL draft picks, Michigan has a greater winning percentage and more all-time wins. Is one clearly better than the other?
No.
Who’s better? Men or women? Democrats or Republicans? Football fans or soccer fans? The Bears or The Packers? Is one clearly better than the other?
No.
* * *
Attempts have been made to explain the adversarial nature of the human experience, so I won’t dare to wander down any of those roads. Why we tend to be this way isn’t as important, I don’t think, as figuring out how to change it so that we don’t tear each other apart. Let’s look around and see what our adversarial lens is doing to the world around us.
–> If you’ve ever paid much attention to sports, the vast majority of sporting events involve this adversarial mentality at their core, and then we become adversarial, by proxy, as fans of certain teams.
–> I noticed the other day that political campaign teams are now being called ‘victory committees’. And, of course, you know what the opposite of victory is: defeat. When our political system is built on the idea that we are going to engage in an activity (voting) which will necessarily create winners and losers, how can we be sure that we aren’t just watching some strange variation of a sporting event.
Oh, I know. It’s different because this sport is the one where the participants RUN THE COUNTRY.
–> Race relations in the United States have been a big problem for as long as the country has been a country. We can’t seem to get past the fact that we are all a little bit different, while at the time being mostly the same (especially in the ways that are most important). The idea that people treat each other so poorly based on differences that are so superficial is so often beyond my comprehension.
–> Men and women have a lot to learn from each other, but this becomes difficult to do when men entrench themselves in the ‘male’ foxhole and the women entrench themselves in the ‘female’ foxhole.
–> The socioeconomic system in America disadvantages a lot of people in our society. We could be doing more for our fellow humans to help them to overcome these disadvantages. Rather, we identify ‘the poor’ in their group and ‘us’ in a different group; then, it is much easier for us to justify treating our fellow humans differently, despite the fact that the differences amount to very little.
You get the idea. We have a lot of problems in our society that have their roots in the ‘us vs. them’ mentality. And, through these examples, it should be easier for us to see that the major issue is this: we think that the differences between ‘us’ & ‘them’ are significant. And, because we tend to stick to ourselves and they tend to stick to themselves, it might be the case that there are people who live their entire lives never learning that the differences, no matter who we are and who they are, aren’t that substantial.
And, the way to get past this belief that we have, that we hang on to, is to reach out and establish relations with members of those ‘other’ groups.
–>If you are a Republican who believes that Democrats are evil devil worshippers, I dare you to establish a relationship with a Democrat. You will discover how wrong you are.
–>If you are a white person who believes that black people are ignorant criminals, I dare you to establish a relationship with a black person. You will discover how wrong you are.
–>If you are a woman who believes that men are sex-crazed neanderthals, I dare you to establish a relationship with a man. You will discover how wrong you are.
* * *
Abraham Lincoln, in 1838, gave a speech where he said, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author…” In this speech, Lincoln was describing that only America would be able to take down America. I think the ‘us vs. them’ mentality in America is a cancer that will be a factor in the equation that brings us down. We must stop this in-fighting, Americans fighting Americans, so we can start fighting the war of repairing the American way of life.
It occurred to me today that judgement is right and judgement is also wrong.
I believe that homosexuality is wrong.
I believe that abortion is wrong.
I believe that racism is wrong.
I believe that extremism is wrong.
I believe that pride and egotism and superiority are wrong.
I also believe that sitting in judgement over other people is wrong.
–>Which isn’t the same thing as saying that judgement is wrong.
Making a decision to grab a parachute before jumping out of a plane –> we would call that good judgement.
Making a decision to not get in the car with the friend, who’s had too much to drink, behind the wheel –> we would call that good judgement.
Making a decision to not buy the Rolex from the guy on the street who’s selling them for $40 –> we would call that good judgement.
* * *
The fact of the matter is that everyone realizes that there is such a thing as good judgement.
And, while we’re on the subject, would you care to guess the most often quoted Bible verse? I’ll give you two hints: 1) it’s not John 3:16, and 2) it’s more often quoted by the World than it’s quoted by the Church.
Give up?!?!
Matthew 7:1
The reason is this: the world is tired of being judged by their fellow humans. And, if there is anyone anywhere who should know better, it’s the Church.
At least a church that had been reading their Bibles would know better.
So, while I do think that our society is traipsing down a dark spiral and while I do think that most of America’s current problems are the result of the country having walked away from God, I can’t tell you how many disagreements I have with many of my fellow Christians about the proper amount of judgement that we should be showering down on the world.
I think that amount should be zero. And here’s why:
Jesus was attractive to sinners. He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes and the socially unclean members of the Jewish society –> they flocked to Him (which disgusted the Pharisees). They did this because He loved them in a way that no one else was willing to love them.
And then, when Jesus eventually did have something to say about the way they were living their lives (which He sometimes did – John 8), they understood that He was doing it in love.
Unfortunately, most of the time, churches judge people without loving them. In fact, the church’s judgement crisis is more of a condemnation of the church that it could ever be a condemnation of the sins of the world.
And, the fact of the matter is this, I’ve messed this up enough times that I should know better. I’ve missed my opportunities to establish relationships with people so that I could lovingly help them to learn some of the lessons that I’ve learned, and instead, I’ve judged them and sent them running in the other direction.
I’m part of the problem.
And, let’s get back to that verse, Matthew 7:1, except let’s look at the whole context.
Jesus was warning His followers that they needed to avoid hypocrisy. The first few verses of Chapter 7 are a warning that people need to avoid judging others if they’d like to avoid harsh judgment by God, especially in situations where they haven’t even dealt with their own issues.
Wouldn’t you want to avoid the harsh and righteous judgement of God, who has been watching this whole time, not just your actions and your words, but the thoughts floating through your head?
Jesus seems pretty clear: if our intention is to run around passing judgement on the world, not out of a loving desire to help them toward the right, but rather, because it makes us feel morally superior, that moral superiority and smug arrogance is going to melt like butter in front of The One True God one day when you try to explain why it is that you thought you were the one who ought to be letting people know how poorly they were living.
I can tell you this. In those situations in my life where I passed judgement on people and damaged the Cause of Christ, I am going to be held responsible one day. I still don’t know what I’m going to say on that day.
My judgments are simply that, my judgments. Even if they are based on scripture (or I believe they are), they are just the judgments of one petty human on their fellow human. They are of no value at all. I should do what I’d do with any other trash and just throw them away.
It occurred to me today why so many people rely on blame.
And, since I’ve written about blame before (LOOK HERE), I’m going to try avoiding the beating of a dead horse.
Instead, I want to talk about learned helplessness.
My students are studying learned helplessness in the Psychology class that I teach. The gist of learned helplessness is that we sometimes stop trying to change our circumstances when we think that change is impossible. People are lead to believe that change is impossible, depending on the attributions that they make: when our attributions are internal, global, and general, we are more likely to believe that change isn’t possible; when our attributions are external, local, and specific, we see change as more likely.
Attribution is a fancy, psychological word for blame.
In other words, people are more likely to view change as possible when they blame the external (others rather than themselves), the local (temporary rather than permanent), and the specific (one situation rather than all situations).
Change ends up seeming impossible when people blame themselves for overarching traits that they think will never change.
In short, blame prolongs hope. Think about it:
When things don’t turn out the way that we want them to, we blame. And that blame –I blame my teacher for my poor quiz score because my teacher is a hard-nosed jerk, or I blame the fact that I didn’t study for the quiz because I would have done better if I had studied, or I blame the fact that I got in a fight with my boyfriend last night because it distracted me from the test– allows our hope to stay alive. Because those circumstances will not always be our circumstances; I will have other teachers who aren’t hard-nosed jerks and I will have days when I bring my A-game and I will have days when I am totally focused. The bad situation that we are in is set in its proper context, rather than being blown out of proportion.
If you read my other post on blame (linked above), it has some frustration in it, because I think blame is often pointless and futile. But, I can see that it serves a certain purpose for people who have almost lost their hope.
I could see why the topic of learned helplessness, especially as it applies in situations like domestic abuse, is a very serious discussion; people in those situations desperately need hope. They need to believe that change is possible, that the “here and now” is not the “all there is”.
So, why is hope so dangerously weak in so many people? Where are we looking for hope that so many people are having such a hard time finding some? If we blame to preserve hope in our lives, isn’t there somewhere else we could be looking to supplement the hope that dwindles? I know the answer to these questions, but I won’t force my answer on anyone.
Additionally, I don’t know if I’m ready to drink the kool-aid on blame as a necessary part of life, at least not in the quantities that you tend to see it in our society. I still think that blame is often meaningless. In fact, I wonder if, rather than taking action to make changes happen when we are dissatisfied with our circumstances, we blame to excuse our inaction.
I mean, let’s face facts, we do tend toward inaction, many of us. The obesity epidemic in America, social injustices that continue to plague us, even the honey-do list that never gets done; it’s just easier for us to do nothing.
The grass might be greener in someone else’s yard, but they aerate in the spring and they fertilize and they spread weed killer every other week and that just seems like so much work…
Sound familiar?
Somewhere along the way, our desire for ease got larger than our desire for progress. We want something better (ask the marketing executives whether or not the public is interested in something better), but we are only interested in it if it’s also easy and quick.
The problem with that philosophy is this: real, substantive change is probably never quick or easy.
On New Year’s Day, I set the goal for myself for 2020 to run an average of one mile per day. Looking back, I don’t remember why I set this goal, but I’ve been getting after it ever since. I think part of me was hoping that I would lose some of the extra weight that I’ve been carrying around for all of my adult life.
Do you know how many pounds I’ve lost since I’ve run the equivalent distance of more than five marathons this year?
Not one ounce.
Pursuing this goal of mine has been neither easy nor quick. But, I’ve learned that the pursuit of progress, just to end up being in a better places down the line than you were when you started, can be its own reward. The faith that it takes to believe that you will be better off, if you just keep trying to make a little progress is what leads to eventual success.
And, I’ve started looking at other parts of my life and thinking to myself, “How can I make some progress happen in this area?” The whole concept of being about progress is starting to become a growth mindset.
* * *
When it’s all said and done, I don’t mean to belittle circumstances where people with no hope are stuck in places where no person should ever be stuck. It would be shameful for someone to suggest that people in those situations should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make change happen. But, I also think that people do tend to play the victim sometimes when they really could be doing more to make things go better in their lives. If the blame game is keeping you from progress, you need to develop past that.
Learned helplessness doesn’t affect whether or not change is possible, it only affects whether we believe change is possible.
It occurred to me today that, sometimes, you just need some more time.
I got an email from a coworker earlier today, asking me to look into a problem with a device that wasn’t connecting to wifi the way that it should. I saw the email, and I thought to myself, “I’ll handle that in a few minutes.”
By the time I got back to my inbox to look into the details of the issue, there was a new email in the thread, saying, “Never mind, we figured it out.”
My favorite kind of problem is the problem that solves itself and my favorite coworker is the coworker that perseveres a little bit to try to find their own answers. As the sole technician for my school district, I have had many, many occasions to discover the joy of the problem that solves itself. With just a little bit of time, a percentage of stuff in my inbox solves itself, sometimes because people continue to work toward their own solution and sometimes because the issue goes away on its own.
Which got me to thinking about the bigger picture (as I so often do).
How many problems have we faced that, through the simple passage of time, become easier to solve or, maybe even, solve themselves?
Of course, this can be a dangerous approach to take with things. My final words to my brother, who died of a freak accident at the age of 31, were words of anger that I thought I would have time to repair. Turns out, I never got that time. But, there have been other examples of interpersonal problems that I’ve been involved in that, regardless of how you tweaked or fiddled with them, weren’t going to be fixed without the passage of some time.
I am a Sudoku fanatic and have been for several years now. I do at least one puzzle everyday (and on most days I do even more than that). Sometimes, when it comes to the hardest puzzles, the best thing I can do is walk away. I will wrestle with a puzzle until I’m blue in the face, but, to walk away for a time, and then to come back and re-engage, I can see things from a whole different perspective.
And, when this happens, I usually smack myself in the forehead and think to myself, “Why didn’t I see that before?”
It’s a loss of perspective that results from me sitting there, frustrated, staring at that puzzle, thinking to myself, “I should be able to solve this!” and “I am probably just a moment or two away from a breakthrough!” and “Why can’t I get this?”, and that’s when I know that I’m too close. I’ve lost my perspective.
Just walk away.
Allow for the passage of time.
We aren’t trained to do this in a society that is perpetually in a hurry. Stopping and giving yourself time is a dying art. But what a difference it can make. Deadlines and pressure to perform and massive workloads make us think that taking time to stop on a problem when we’re stumped is going to get us in trouble or is a waste of time. But, it’s not any more of a waste of time than it would be to sit at a problem, starting it in the face, perspective lost, going nowhere.
At least, if you get up and walk away, you could go and do something else.
And, I promise you that this has happened to me a thousand times –> after I’ve walked away from something, it will occur to me what I should try that I hadn’t tried before.
Additionally, but along these same lines, I’ve found on multiple occasions in life, the best thing to do when you don’t know what to do is to wait for things to become clearer. As time goes by, often, more of the picture gets revealed to the point where it’s easier to make decisions that are level-headed and intelligent.
For example, I used to play trivia games in bars and restaurants where the point of the game was to be able to answer the question as quickly as possible, for max points. But, if you didn’t know the answer, the clock would tick away and wrong answers would get removed, so that you could eventually answer correctly –for fewer points, of course– even if you didn’t know what the correct answer was in the first place.
Or, if you’ve ever seen these puzzles before –> a super-zoomed-in picture of something that you can’t possibly recognize pans out until you are, at a certain point, able to recognize what you’re looking at. Sure, you could guess early on at what the picture might be, or you could just for things to become more clear.
When it comes down to it, the passage of time is good for a lot of things.
When my children microwave french fries to have them done in thirty seconds but they end up tasting like rubber, but I get out the deep fryer and preheat the oil and cook the fries and they taste phenomenal.
Or the student who reads the email in twelve seconds but got none of the information vs. the methodical and steady student who takes their time and does things right the first time. When Speedy Gonzales has to go back and reread the email a second time, they end up having accomplished the task no faster for having to do it twice than the student who did it slow and properly the first time.
Or, if you ever seen the movie “Cars” (a Disney Pixar classic), the story of Radiator Springs, and the story of Route 66 in real life, is the story of America’s desire to get things done as quickly as possible and how that obsession affected the cities and towns that were eventually bypassed by the resulting freeways. The most wonderful part of that movie is the feel that Radiator Springs has, with its slower, more enjoyable pace of life.
Time is valuable, no doubt. And wasting time is to be avoided, most certainly. But, taking a little bit longer to do things well, or allowing for some time to pass so that you can regain perspective or so that things around you can become more clear, isn’t a waste at all.
It occurred to me today that life is just so damn complicated, we might be incapable of understanding much of any of it.
I have a chocolate chip cookie recipe. It’s mine, and no, you can’t have it. It started from some generic cookie recipe off of the internet, about a decade ago. I remember, at the time, being jealous of some of the old ladies from my church whose chocolate chip cookies were so enjoyable. And, of course, I asked these ladies, one by one, what the secret of their wonderful cookies was. I asked Carol and Lucille and Nancy.
They wouldn’t tell me.
And so, I set out to discover the secrets on my own. The first time I made the recipe that I printed off of the internet, I didn’t like it. Not because what I made on that day, so many years ago, was bad. No, I didn’t like it because it wasn’t like the cookies that those little old ladies were making.
I remember standing in front of that first batch of cookies and hearing those little old ladies laughing at me inside my head. “Those aren’t like our at all!” “I wonder what they’ll taste like?” “They won’t be delicious like ours!”
And so began a years-long process of tweaking it to make it my own.
In fact, to look at the recipe now, it’s hard to read the original printed text underneath all of the additions and corrections that I’ve made to the original sheet of printer paper. I tweaked just about every part of that recipe, and I documented those tweaks on the recipe itself. More often than not, my tweaks were bad ideas and so I would end up tweaking something else. In fact, I would often make small batches, specifically because I wanted to tweak something and I had no idea how it would turn out –> a batch of two dozen failed cookies wasn’t as bad as a batch of five dozen.
I tweaked the ratio of baking soda to corn starch. I tweaked the amount of chocolate chips. I tweaked the baking temperatures and the baking times and how long to leave them on the parchment paper before transferring them to the cooling rack. I tweaked blend times and vanilla amounts. In the end, I am sure that I seemed obsessed, to my wife, for a period of about five or six years.
Then, the tweaking got to be less and less drastic. At that point, slight changes, that made the recipe even better, were the norm. And finally, after years and years of experimentation and trial and error, I would say that the recipe has been pretty good now, for at least a year or two.
You want to know the funny part?
Sometimes, when I make the cookies these days, after having tweaked just about every single facet of that recipe, they still turn out bad.
And that’s when I throw my hands up in the air and I think to myself, “What the $&*%@????”
And when they go bad, I try to figure out what went wrong, and that’s when I stand, staring at a fairly complicated equation, right in the face, and I wonder.
Has my baking soda gone bad? What’s the relative humidity today inside the house? Is the oven starting to go bad? It is ten years old. Where did I buy that last bag of flour from? Am I using Aldi’s flour when I should have used Harding’s flour?
And I can literally stand there for several minutes wondering what happened.
And, mind you, this is a cookie recipe. It’s not that complicated, relatively speaking. Sure, when you get down into the nitty-gritty of the details of the thing, it seems pretty complex. But, how complex is this recipe compared with, oh I don’t know, epidemiology?
Because, here we are in the middle of this pandemic (you didn’t see this coming, did you? Me, turning the conversation in this direction? Huh?)…
I mean, I literally don’t know what to believe anymore. Masks, or no masks? The CDC or the WHO? What’s the current list of symptoms? It used to be four, and now it’s nine, and next week it might be twelve? If I had it, can I get it again? What’s the difference between a test for the virus and a test for the antibodies?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
If I have no idea what went wrong when my cookies don’t turn out right, how am I supposed to know what the right thing to do is, for my health and the health of my family? And, before you offer me your opinion of what I ought to do, make a copy of your medical credentials available for my review, thank you very much. At least I have learned to stop getting my medical advice (or moral advice or economic advice) from politicians and/or social media.
And, I’m no dope. I am a pretty well-educated, pretty ‘quick on the uptake’ kind of guy.
In the end, maybe it’s just too complicated to know.
I guess I’ll just eat the cookies when they turn out bad and be thankful for those batches that were perfect.
It occurred to me today that I’ve been married for nineteen years.
And I can’t even tell you all of the wonderful things that have happened during those nineteen years. Amazing things and exciting things and marvelous things.
My wife and I have purchased two homes in those nineteen years. Our starter home, which we bought because circumstances required us to move out of our starter apartment, was 1100 square feet. Our current family of five would have driven each other to homicide if we were still in that home. We stayed in that home for almost seven years. All three of our children started out their home life in that cozy little home. We ended up selling it to the man who sold us our second home, and he flipped our first house as he’d flipped our second.
Our current home has been our home for ten and a half years. There’s a bit of contention as to whether or not this will be our forever home, but it has definitely met our needs. Primarily, it is almost three times the size of our first home. And, contrary to what you would have expected to happen, we moved from a house built in the 1950s to a house built in the 1860s (I’m still questioning that move).
My wife and I have brought three children into the world in those nineteen years. Our eldest, born in 2004, is now getting close to 16 years old, and he is my favorite son. Our twin daughters, born in 2007, are among my three favorite women in the world. The five of us are each uniquely individual and, at the same time, a strong single unit with unbreakable ties.
My wife and I have owned six vehicles in those nineteen years: 3 sedans, two mini-vans, and a truck. We have been in possession of a mini-van for as long as we’ve been a family of five, but when we first started out, we were a two-sedan couple. The truck came in during a time when my job required me to do some hauling, and I’d secretly always wanted a truck. Of course, we got rid of the truck not long after we got news that we were expecting twins.
My wife and I have rented one apartment in those nineteen years, when we were first starting out. As a matter of fact, I lived in the apartment for a week before the wedding because I needed a placed to stay after the end of my college apartment lease, but before our nuptials. We stayed in that apartment for about a year and a half, from the spring of 2001 to the fall of 2002.
Our only other significant real estate dealing was the purchase of a single piece of vacant land while we were in our first house, when we thought we might build a house some day. Do you know what it costs to build a new home, by the way?!?! We bought it before the slump of ’08, tried selling it thereafter, and ended up taking a bath on the whole thing.
We’ve only had four jobs in those nineteen years, which is, in itself, a major miracle. We were both in starter professional positions at the point when we got married, we both ended up moving into better professional positions within eighteen months of our wedding, and we’ve been in those better professional positions ever since. We have been extremely blessed to work for institutions that have been faithful to us and have been inspirational places to work, for the most part.
Unless I’m mistaken, we’ve been using the same electric can opener the whole time.
I bring all of this up because, as much change as there has been in nineteen years –this car and that house and this job and that child’s major life event– the constant has been the two of us.
When I was waiting tables, hoping to get a teaching job somewhere, Jennie was my wife.
When the World Trade Center was attacked and the world seemed to become a little less stable, Jennie was my wife.
When my wife and I figured out that her periodic back aches in the middle of a June night weren’t back aches at all, but rather uterine contractions, Jennie was my wife.
When I earned my Master’s Degree and she earned her Master’s Degree, Jennie was my wife.
When my only brother died and I thought that the world was coming to an end, Jennie was my wife.
When our twin daughters were born so small that there was a real chance that they wouldn’t survive, Jennie was my wife.
When neither of us knew how we were going to make it through having a child recovering from open-heart surgery, Jennie was my wife.
Jennie has always been my wife. She will always be my wife. We will stay together, as we have always been together, because we are –at this point– one. Our oneness, our shared identity, this shared set of experiences we’ve had, our family, our entwined destiny, all of these things are treasures which belong to us because our marriage is a sacred thing.
It hasn’t always been great, but no life is all roses. The greatest thing about it is this –> the bad times aren’t as bad because we have each other, and the great times are even greater, because we have each other.
I’ve made some crap decisions in my life (I never should have gotten rid of that truck — I loved that truck), and I’ve made some pretty decent ones, as well.
The very best choice that I’ve ever made was marrying my wife.
It occurred to me today that there are very few things that are “always” or “never”.
Think about it –especially during this unique moment in history when our previous lives have been significantly disrupted– how many things do you know that always happen or never happen? Try to come up with a list in your head. I’ll wait…
* * *
The fact of the matter is that you probably couldn’t come up with much of a list at all. While I have been thinking on the subject of this post, I tried myself to come up with a list. The list of things that seem to me to be most consistent, all tended to be natural things (i.e., the sun always rises and always sets, the tide always goes out and the tide always comes in, etc.), but that’s not where I want to go with the subject of this post.
Rather, I want to talk about people and blanket statements.
Accusations aimed at people that they “always”, or they “never”, are called blanket statements, because they are meant to ‘cover’ a variety of different options. Blanket statements are, more often than not, untrue, if for no other reason than the fact that people just don’t tend to be that consistent. While the tide and the sun might be consistent, humans just don’t ever really achieve that same level of dependability.
The husband who always leaves his socks on the floor has probably, at some point, left his socks somewhere other than the floor. It might even be the case that the husband, at some point, has put his socks where they belong. But, the wife who is attempting to make the strongest possible case against the sins of the husband, can’t say something like, “You leave your socks on the floor a majority of the time.”, even though it would be closer to the truth. Firing that particular volley across to the ‘enemy’ wouldn’t have the same weight. The argument against a statement like that is clear –> “Well, I sometimes put them where they’re supposed to be.”
The wife who never has dinner prepared on time has probably, at some point, made dinner on time. The employee who never shows initiative has probably, at some point, taken it upon themselves to start a project.
The problem is that people just aren’t that consistent. They’re not consistently bad, no matter what you’d like to think of them, and conversely, they’re not consistently good, either (no matter what you’d like to think of them). It’s the inconsistency that really bothers us.
Who wouldn’t want a husband that always puts his socks in the hamper, and for that matter, also does everything else a husband’s supposed to do? Who wouldn’t want a wife that always has dinner ready on time, and for that matter, also does everything else a wife’s supposed to do? The same goes for the employee.
We have in mind an ideal, and as it turn out, people never can match that ideal. They are all, without fail, inconsistently getting close to the mark and also, at other times, falling short of the mark.
But, heaven forbid that anyone ever hold us to an expectation of consistency?!?!
* * *
From here, we move to stereotypes, which are blanket statements about entire groups of people, again that “they always blah blah blah blah” or “they never blah blah blah blah”.
The word ‘stereotyping’ probably got you thinking about certain groups of people that are the popular targets of blanket statements (different races, different genders, etc.), but you can make a blanket statement (stereotype) about any group of people that you’d like.
And, chances are, if you’re going to do it, you’ll end up doing it about the ‘other’ group if the blanket statement is negative and about ‘your’ group if the blanket statement is positive. For example, if I’m a Democrat, I am less likely to say that “All Democrats are morons.” than I am to say “All Republicans are morons.” Or, if I’m an American, I am less likely to say that “All Americans are fools.” than I am to say “All Europeans are fools.”
The issue with the blanket statement is the same here as it was when we were making blanket statements about individuals. The inconsistent makeup of a group of people doesn’t lend itself to us making blanket statements (stereotypes) about any group. Are there blonds who are brainless? Absolutely! Are all blonds brainless? Of course not. In the same manner, all black men are not criminals and all Jews are not stingy and all college graduates are not intelligent, even though some members of each of those groups live up to the stereotypes.
It’s a shame that, as a society, so many of us are still stuck in the mode of thinking that buys into the hype of stereotypes. However, as time has gone by, there have been signs that society is starting to recognize the problem with these over-simplifying blanket statements.
Take heroes and villains, for example. Fifty years ago, our heroes were good and our villains were bad, and that was the way that we liked it. We wanted heroes who were good all of the time because they gave us a character worth admiring, and we wanted our villains to be evil, because they gave us a character worth despising.
Additionally, heroes and villains like these make things clearer for us; we ought to root for the hero and we ought to jeer the villain.
But then, somewhere along the line, we started muddying the waters. Our heroes became complicated by their darkness, by their less-than-pristine hearts, BY THEIR INCONSISTENCY. I’m not sure why we started to head in this direction –more relatable characters, perhaps– but the result is that we end up with heroes that aren’t worth cheering for and villains who really aren’t that bad. Maybe, when I think about it, this is the way that things really are. Maybe, heroes and villains like these are a more honest reflection of reality.
Stephen King, my favorite author of all time, has been quoted as saying that we ought “to tell stories about what people actually do –to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
Remember the movie “Hancock” (2008), starring Will Smith as a drunkard of a superhero who almost does more harm than good? How about the recent string of Deadpool movies? These characters are referred to as ‘anti-heroes’, because they end up doing heroic things in their stories, despite lacking many of the classically heroic traits. And of course, then there is the ‘anti-villain’, who aspires to something great, but goes about their aspirations in the most evil of ways. If you’ve never seen “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”, this movie will destroy all of your preconceived notions about heroes and villains (viewer discretion is advised).
In the end, we are all so inconsistent. Don’t ever believe anyone who would have you understand otherwise, because what they are selling you is a myth that could lead you to expectations that are unreasonable. Guess what, spouses? There isn’t a mate around that is doing it all right, all of the time. Guess what, employers? Good luck finding that perfect employee.
We should just start cutting each other some slack. The blanket statements that we use to impose our expectations on each other are over-simplifications that just don’t hold up in the real world. The good guy isn’t always good and the bad guy isn’t always bad.
If we could free the people around us from the burden of meeting our expectations, we could also free ourselves of the eventual disappointment when they don’t.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before or not, but in addition to being a teacher, I am also a technologist for my school district. Actually, I am the only technologist for my school district. That means I’m a helper.
The great thing about being a helper is that it makes people happy, and I have always enjoyed doing that. I’m a people pleaser. Additionally, I picture myself a pretty funny guy, which is really just a different approach to making people happy –> getting them to laugh. Between being a helper and being a comedian, people around me smile all the time.
Well, maybe not ALL the time.
Anyway, when helping people makes you happy, it creates a dependency. I need to help people, especially the ones who I know will end up happy as a result. I like being happy (who doesn’t) and so I help people because making them happy, makes me happy. Just this past Thursday, as a matter of fact, I helped someone and she emailed me back and said, “YOU ROCK!”, and that made me happy.
I may even (subconsciously, of course) avoid helping people who seem to be perturbed regardless of whether or not they get the help they need –> you know the ones: “My computer’s broken (GRRRRR!)… you fixed it (GRRRRR!)”. Those people don’t do it for me, even though I’m obligated to help them (because of my job). I will eventually get around to helping those people, but only after I helped the “YOU ROCK” crowd.
Now, it becomes a co-dependency when the people I help, need me to help them as much as I need the opportunity to help them. There are staff members where I work that need me very little, and that’s okay (in fact, it’s great –> I wouldn’t be able to handle it if everyone needed me significantly). And then, there are the staff members who struggle with technology and they are loathe to do anything about it.
Because they need me, the technologist, and I need to be needed, we end up in this co-dependent dance. They pretend to feel bad for requiring my assistance all the time (which of course doesn’t really bother them or they’d do something about it –> take a class or watch a YouTube video or something), and I pretend that it’s no bother and that I’m happy to assist.
But, it’s in the midst of this co-dependency that a critical problem arises. Maybe you’ve already seen it coming (the title of the post).
I enable the bad behavior of the people around me so I can help them.
The mother who bails her son out every time he gets in a pickle because she needs him to need her. The wife who covers for her husband when he fails as the father of his children. The employee who cleans up after his fellow employee to keep the boss from noticing the ineptitude. These people are enablers. Enablers prevent people from ever having to face the music, and because they’re never made to feel the consequences of the bad choices that they make, they continue to make those bad choices, thereby creating the circumstances in which the enabler –more than willing– is able to offer assistance and be the helper, the people-pleaser, the hero.
Perfect example: in February, I sent an email out to the people that I work with, including some advice that they should follow to keep from getting into a bit of tech trouble coming in the future. The email went out to about sixty teachers, with a link to a video that I’d posted to help them with the issue.
Then, on Friday, the tech trouble that I warned about in February came home to roost, and I got more than a dozen (and counting) requests from people needing assistance with the problem. When these requests starting coming in that morning, I LOST MY MIND. I LOST MY FREAKING MIND!
I went back and I checked to see when I’d sent that email (February) and then I checked the number of views on that YouTube video.
–13–
13 people watched that video, linked in that email. I sent the video to 60 teachers and 13 people watched it.
And then I lost my mind AGAIN!
And then, I realized something: I’m creating my own problems.
What I should do, when these requests come in from people who haven’t followed the directions that I gave back in February, is ignore the requests. In fact, if I ignored every request for assistance that came to me on an issue for which I’d previously issued instructions, people would start following my instructions when I gave them, for there would be no other choice… well, no other choice than failure.
How amazing would that be!
Then again, I’d probably run out of things to do to keep me busy. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
I mean, how long would it take me to address, in some form of communication, all of the problems that all of the users in my school district are likely to ever face with their technology? Hell, I’m already the laughing stock of the district when people ask me a question and I answer with, “I’m sure that there’s a video about that on my YouTube channel.”
What if I built instructions for every problem and then stopped responding to requests for assistance? People would know where to get the information, and I could stop enabling their bad behavior.
Sure, there’d be new problems, but I could then issue instructions on those, as they came up.
Or, for that matter, what would happen if doctors stopped treating patients who failed to follow their directions? What would happen if paramedics only treated people in emergency situations that were accidental. Tree falls on you –> paramedic treats you, shoot yourself in the foot –> you’re on your own.
Google “naloxone and paramedics” sometime; you’ll be treated to a very real world example of the argument between enabling bad behavior and forcing people to face the consequences of their choices.
That’s the thing about helping, I guess. Even if the helping is enabling, in some form or other, and even if the enabler realizes that they are enabling bad behavior, it is their desire to help.
Is helping people with their problems always the right thing to do? Probably not. Is there anyone out there with a good rule as to when you should use tough love and when you should come to someone’s assistance?
It occurred to me today that some people think I’m a magician.
I’ve run into it before with my kids. I’ve run into it before with my coworkers and with my students. They think I’m a magician.
And I’m sure that I’m not the only one. There are probably different types of workers, all over the economy, that are viewed as magicians because people don’t understand what’s involved in their work and so, the fact that these people are able to do their jobs must mean their magical in some way.
For me, it comes with the territory of being a computer technician. Because people don’t understand how computers work, how to fix them, how to troubleshoot the issues that you have when you are working on one, they think that anyone who is capable of fixing them and making them work is somehow special.
I assure you, I am not special.
I have a friend in the town where I live who’s the head auto mechanic at one of the most popular auto shops in town –> he says the same thing. When a customer doesn’t understand that there is an intricacy to the way that an automobile functions, they are likely to view those people who fix cars as endowed with some sort of special powers.
There are multiple problems that this creates, not the least of which is a communication gap.
When someone asks me to troubleshoot a computer problem that they are having, the least they can do, to help me in helping them, is to offer as much detailed information as possible. But, this often doesn’t happen, especially when the person with the problem doesn’t know much at all about computers. When I am dealing with users who fall significantly short of being knowledgeable, the request for assistance usually ends up sounding like, “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
I can’t do anything with, “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
Imagine taking your car to the mechanic and saying, “It’s broke; please fix it.”
Or going to your doctor and saying, “I’m in pain; please fix it.”
My favorite user is the one who offers as much pertinent information as possible to try to help me troubleshoot the problem. For a computer technician, the kind of information that is useful to me is information like, “When did the problem first start happening?” and “Does the problem happen all the time, or only part of the time?” and “What are you doing on the computer when the problem occurs?” and “What steps have you tried to fix the problem yourself?” and…
You get the idea. The more information I get, the better. I can’t do anything with, “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
In the event that I get a “It doesn’t work; please fix it.” kind of a request, the problem usually ends up going in one of a couple of different directions.
I will sometimes just ignore the request, in the hopes that the problem goes away or the person realizes their own issue and solves it themselves.
Or, I can pull information out of them, which is sometimes like pulling an infected tooth out of the mouth of an alligator –> not pleasant and to be avoided when possible. I ask questions, either one at a time or a series of simple ones all at once, and the user either gets frustrated with having to answer so many questions or the exchange of information takes so long that it gets me frustrated.
I guess when it comes down to it, the issue is an issue of time. I don’t necessarily enjoy having to spend a large amount of time getting the details that I need out of the user. In my rush to do a thousand different things in a day, I don’t have time for “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
And now, I can feel this post coming full circle. I feel like I am coming face-to-face with this truth: I need to exercise more patience with those people who know the least about computers because they are the ones most likely to give me a “It doesn’t work; please fix it.” kind of a request. It doesn’t require a lot of patience when I am working with someone who is 1) somewhat knowledgeable, and 2) significantly forthcoming, because I know that dealing with these types of users isn’t going to be so bad. We will put our heads together and we will find the solution to the problem.
The patience becomes of paramount importance when I’m dealing with less skilled users because the distance between their knowledge and my knowledge is the farthest.
Additionally, in my drive to DO! DO! DO! DO! and ACCOMPLISH! ACCOMPLISH! ACCOMPLISH!, I feel that I am under pressure to get things quickly done. I don’t mind that pressure, most of the time, because –to be completely honest– that pressure gives me an excuse to avoid having to engage people in meaningful conversations centered around their needs as computer users.
Come to think of it, I am starting to wonder if I treat everyone this way?!?!
I don’t have time to talk, I’ve got to do X and Y and Z and we should catch up sometime and I’d love to come over but Timmy has soccer practice and Betty has an ortho appointment.
Maybe the busy-ness of our lives is always at war with our attempts to establish real connections with people. For me, the drive to accomplish secretly serves my introverted tendencies so I don’t have to connect with people because I’m “too busy”.
Do you have time to talk? Do you have time to invest in the connection between you and the people around you? If I fix one thousand computer problems, and connect with zero of the computer users around me, what have I accomplished, really?
It Occurred To Me Today 