when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop
- e.e. cummings -
I was going to quote Ayn Rand instead of e.e. cummings, but honestly, I hate Ayn Rand, and I have another post to write in a couple of days (when I'm a bit calmer), on another situation entirely, that seems to merit that particular quote more.
I had this post all written out in my head when I was in the bath - I do my best thinking in the bath - and now a lot of it's gone. Dammit. You'll have to forgive me if my thoughts don't flow as well as they should.
Today, Sati is going to tell you a couple of stories. They're true stories. And I'm no Aesop, or even Scheherezade, but I think that there are things that can be learned from them. There is some humor in them, in hindsight, but at the time they could have been quite serious.
The first is a tale from about five years ago, when I was just out of my teens and had been working at my current workplace for about four years. I work in Dagenham - for anyone who doesn't know London, that's a fairly rough area just outside the city proper (technically in Essex, but I still consider it London, as do most people I know) - and for the whole time I've been working there, my mother and most of my friends have been worried about me getting hurt, as I have to deal with the seedier side of life on a fairly regular basis. However, the only physical violence I've ever personally experienced while working came completely out of the blue, not from a drug addict or a gang member or an angry parent, but from a fairly "good" (albeit hasty) girl at work who is now a friendly acquaintance. This is a story about that time.
I tend to go by the title of youth worker, but this can mean a number of things. In turns, I am mother, big sister, cook, maid, counsellor, nurse, legal advocate, bodyguard. My duties include running a telephone helpline for kids who need either someone to listen or practical help (like someone to organize somewhere new to live if they have to leave home / a lawyer if they've gotten themselves into trouble / a lift home if they got dumped by their date / etc), giving talks on the physical effects of STDs, counselling rape victims, basic cooking, cleaning, baking treats, organising parties, helping with homework and / or tutoring, acting as an advocate if parents are being abusive, filling in forms for college applications / citizenship / EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance - money that 16-18 year olds from poor families are given by the government if they stay in full-time education and go to all their classes) and teaching basic life skills, amongst other things. On this particular day I was working with five boys who had either recently moved out of their parents' home or were planning to do so soon, and we were having a pretty good time - in the morning I'd taught them how to make vegetable soup and chicken stir-fry with rice, and in the afternoon we'd moved onto washing and ironing clothes. We were walking down the back hall, away from the laundry room, and I was talking, and the next thing I knew a hand was flying out from somewhere and hitting me smack bang on my nose, and a girl's voice was screaming obscenities at me.
It hurt a lot, and bled like a mofo, and I blacked out for a few minutes. When I came around I wasn't sure what the hell had happened, and could only assume that I'd run into something. And then I remembered the fist and the yelling, but still wasn't sure what was going on. So we all tramped into Paul's (that's my boss) office, with a girl I vaguely knew glaring at me the whole time and occasionally shouting, and got it sorted out. To cut a long story short, I'd been talking to my boys (who were mostly Black; only about 20% of the kids where I work are white) about how to wash their clothes properly, and she hadn't heard any of the conversation except me saying something about how important it is to keep whites and coloureds separate. That hit a button for her, and so she hit me, thinking that she was defending people from me.
I can look back on this now and laugh, but at the time it hurt. It hurt physically - I fractured my nasalis bone and had a black eye for two weeks; luckily the nose didn't get pushed out of joint enough to need it reset, but I still have a noticeable lump that you can see in my old profile photo:
It also hurt emotionally. Having my motives called into question was painful, but what was more painful was knowing that *I* hurt someone enough, with my words, to push them to react with physical violence - even if my words were taken in a different way to how I meant them, and it was just a big misunderstanding.
Poor communications can do this sometimes. As individuals, we are never fully able to see through another person's eyes, and this can lead us to misunderstand what they mean. We hear something, and for whatever reason - we don't like the person it comes from, we're overzealous in what we perceive as being the defense of a friend, maybe we're just having a bad day - we decide that they mean something unkind by it. And rather than asking straight out, what did you mean by that? a lot of us prefer to raise our hackles and go into "defense mode" - which ends up being more of an attack mode, because we're defending ourselves against an imagined enemy.
Sometimes I hear the recurring drama on the blogs as being referred to as a blog war. I dislike this term, because I think that anyone who's ever seen a real war (and I haven't been in a military war, but I have been on the streets of Peckham and Hackney and Brixton back in 2007-8, when kids were getting killed in turf wars every week) would find it an offensive comparison. Yet there is some truth in the term. One of the things that I believe is central to just about every war the modern world has seen is that both sides think that God is on their side. Substitute the words "truth" or "righteousness" for "God" and you have a similar situation here now. Everyone who's been involved in this conflict, including me, thinks that the people they know and like are right and reasonable, and the people who dislike them, or who they dislike, are acting unfairly and wrongly.
The people on here who I call friends, or friendly acquaintances, have never been anything but kind to me. I've rarely seen them be anything but kind to anyone. Yet I understand that not everybody sees things this way. Some of the people that I like are hated by others. And some of the people I dislike are well-loved. This goes for real life, too: the woman who did her best to singlehandedly ruin my life has tons of friends and the love of a man who I have a lot of affection and admiration for. She's a nurse and a Christian, and she does plenty of volunteer work. And, in my eyes, she's nuts. To her friends and lovers, she's a great person, but to me she will always be the person who stalked me all over the internet, leaving increasingly vile comments on my Facebook and MySpace profiles and, more seriously, my college site blog - resulting in me losing my job as blog representative for my college and subsequently, since I could no longer afford tuition without the staff discount, dropping out of school.
So is she a good woman, or a psycho? Which of these is the truth? Does it even matter? I suppose it does, but I don't think I'll ever get an answer. Some people will always love her, and I will always dislike her. Our respective truths are not compatible. Maybe one day she'll do something to cause Oli to realise that she has a cruel streak, and maybe he'll never see her in that way. Sometimes we simply cannot see a situation from another person's perspective, no matter how hard we try. In these cases, we need to step away from the person. Yes, it hurts when you see someone who you feel is manipulating people getting adored for it. It hurts when we see something that offends our sense of rightness and fair play, and other people don't see it. It hurts, and it makes us angry. Believe me, I understand the anger - over the last month I've seen things that have me seething, and no matter how I tell myself it isn't important - it FEELS important. It feels WRONG.
Yet from a practical standpoint, there is very little that can be gained from stirring things up. It doesn't matter whether you honestly believe that you are righteously defending your friends, or whether you just enjoy your anger too much. (And IMO, there are people on the blogs who fall into both camps.) Flaming a person who you feel deserves it may feel good at the time, may even appear to have some benefits in the short-term, but when it comes to the long-term, who are you really helping? What purpose are you serving, except to perpetuate the anger? Are you educating people about the unfairness that runs rampant on here? Maybe. But maybe not. The way you feel about particular people and situations is real to you, but it is subjective. Some people will agree with you, and therefore don't need convincing - and others will never see what you see, and will defend their friends' honor till their dying breath. These people you cannot get through to.
It's getting late, and I'm rambling. So just a few other points I'd like to make, and a few to reiterate:
~ TRUTH and OPINION are not synonymous.
~ If someone sees something different to you, it doesn't mean that they're blind or naive, just that they're different.
~ If someone is friends with someone you dislike, it doesn't necessarily make them a follower or a pawn. Not everyone is friends with someone because they need something from them - sometimes they just LIKE them. I get that some people don't want to be friends with people who have friends that they don't like. Bearing in mind that everyone is going to know SOMEONE you dislike - or at least someone who knows someone who knows someone - I don't agree with it, but I get it. Fine. Decide for yourself how many degrees of separation you can live with. A word of advice, though: if you can't live with any less than five or six degrees of separation between you and your enemies, you're probably going to have a very lonely world.
~ If you are going to block someone from your blog, you also need to block them from your words, and at least attempt to block them from your thoughts. Banning someone and then blogging about them all the time is senseless, and IMO, it's dishonorable. Make a choice: either allow someone the option to explain their words and actions and attempt to change your opinion of them if they're so inclined, or excise them from your life. There is a reason for the saying, "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." If you do not want to see or hear someone, do not speak about them.
~ If trouble seems to follow you, ask yourself what YOU could do differently. It is easier to change your behavior than to constantly keep changing your surroundings. This is not a matter of who is to blame for the trouble, rather a matter of what changes can be made to improve the situation. And if you cannot come up with anything that you think you could change about youself - ask yourself why.
~ A person who can admit that they were wrong is brave, but a person who can admit that they were wrong and leave up the post that they regret making is braver by a dozen times. Far too many of us remove things that we have written, as though by removing the post we can rewrite history to make ourselves appear cleaner and better than we really were. By all means, write an addendum to the post that says you feel differently now, and regret saying what you said, but don't pretend you didn't say it.
~ Remember that nobody ever regretted their compassion, even when it was misplaced or unmerited.
Finally, I point all of you to my signature. Not to the post link - although if you want to read that, that's fine - but to the quote. Be the change you want to see. James told me that, and it's something that I try to remember every day.
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