I get a little petty when my buttons are pushed. (It’s the stage preceding the desire to annihilate.)
Today at That Other Place someone made an argument that Reagan was the last real leader we’ve had in the White House, that he was the “penultimate leader”. A couple of others politely pointed out that this was the wrong word, that penultimate means next-to-last. To which the person replied that he had in fact checked with Word’s thesaurus, which said it meant “last but one” and that he was therefore correct. I pointed out that “last but one” means there had to be one more after Reagan, which is the opposite of the point he was trying to make.
He restated his argument that “last but one” was what he meant: there have been no leaders after Reagan, so he was the last but one. Both his usage and mine were correct.
“Stupid”. It’s a Big Red Button for me. Call me stupid and you’re going to find yourself in hotter water than you’re likely to survive. Think supercharged steam, because that’s what will be coming out my ears. Or think boiling blood, because that’s what will soon be coming out of yours.
“Retard”. This one has bugged me for years. In what universe is it acceptable to conflate an unfortunate and blameless condition with making poor choices, expressing ill-considered remarks, or acting in bad judgment? How did you get from that universe to ours, where there’s a world of difference between someone who’s doing the best they can with what they’ve got and someone who’s just being deeply and laughably dumb? And – more importantly – how quickly can you get back there from here? Because your kind of mindset is SO not welcome here.
The c-word. Not even going to type that one out. Sorry, but it’s just inexcusable and repugnant to reduce a woman to her genitals. Categorically and universally unacceptable. I once saw a woman driving a truck in stop-and-go traffic with her dog in the back, and she kept stopping harder to knock it off its feet. She kept yelling at it for not lying down. I was sorely tempted to call her a number of awful things for abusing that dog, but I didn’t. And if I held back from dropping a c-bomb on someone who was abusing a frightened and confused dog – an animal that I consider very embodiment of unconditional love and fidelity – then I think the rest of you can take that word out of your vocabulary as well.
Yes, they’re just words. So are about a zillion others I could throw at you and leave you wondering whether you should ever bother getting out of bed again. So let’s not any of us waste time with that whole “sticks and stones may break my bones” nonsense. Seriously. If you ever reach the point where insults and derision don’t bother you, you have either attained total enlightenment or you have descended into sociopathy. Emotional damage is just as real and just as wrong as the physical kind.
So another of my Big Red Buttons (my, I do have a lot of them) is my writing.
I have an unfortunate tendency to assume that whatever I’ve written is as very near to perfection as any human can make it. While I think it’s good for me to have confidence in my work and my abilities, assuming that I am Shakespeare 2.0 is just ridiculous. Not only is it just over-the-top crazy arrogant, it makes it very hard to achieve any actual improvement in my work. No one can tell me any way to do better because no one can tell me anything.
I took a couple of poetry composition classes in college. I don’t remember being resistant to the feedback of my classmates, but then I don’t remember a lot of things from those days. (And many of the memories I have are clearly false.) Plus my poetry isn’t as close to my heart as my stories. I’m very occasionally an okay poet. I like to think I’m a good prose writer. So I imagine myself sharing a story with someone else, and it going a lot like this:
ME: So here is a story I wrote about were-dingoes. I am super-proud of it. Is it not awesome and epic in every way?
SOMEONE ELSE: Well, I like the were-dingo part. The big fight scene in the abandoned sword factory with the hovercraft and the cyborg girls was way cool. But the sex scene is kinda laughable.
ME: What? Crazy talk. You just don’t get it. Silence, Philistine! I will hear no more of your insolent nattering. (slinks off to sulk and be sad, poor misunderstood artist that he is)
On the plus side, I get to be defensive and rude. On the minus side, everyone who reads my were-dingo story has to endure a were-dingo sex scene that eclipses the previous record set by Tom Clancy for “Worst Sex Scene Writing EVER“. I think we all know how that balances out. It’s a significant disadvantage for me as a writer, because it keeps me from getting valuable feedback. Also it makes me seem like a jerk, which is never good.
On the other hand, there are times when I just go with that and am mostly okay with it. Today at that Other Place, I was addressing a friend’s point about income disparity. She’d pointed out that a group of 200 top executives averaged over $10 million in compensation last year, whereas the average American worker made something like $750 a week. I was pointing out some concerns I had with the argument: how was this group of executives selected? It would be pretty easy to cherry-pick the 200 highest-paid ones and skew the numbers – for every Wall Street banker who raked in fat cash for her work, there are any number of people running smaller businesses making a lot less than that. I’m all for discussing income disparity, but I want to compare apples to apples.
In comes someone I will call the Inflamer. She is easily one of the most infuriating people I’ve ever encountered. She very frequently starts these ridiculous arguments and keeps them going for days, and usually it’s because she’ll make these ridiculous sweeping generalizations (“Republicans all love war because it makes them richer” or “The people who are against Obama just hate him because he’s black”) and refuse to back down from them when challenged. She supports Obama’s calls for more civilized political discourse, and in the same breath uses terms like “Rethuglicans”. She seems to lack even basic critical thinking skills – she recently posted a link to an article that cited “magic sparkle ponies with their cell phones” in attendance at a press conference, and only later realized it was satire. She’s inconsistent, abrasive, and just generally obnoxious.
Rather than address my point – that a comparison of 200 selected individuals to the whole working population of the U.S. might be misleading – she decided to address my use of the female pronoun. Most Wall Street bankers aren’t women, which to her invalidated my point. Except it didn’t. Yes, Wall Street executives and bankers are disproportionately male. And that is an injustice in itself. It’s not the issue I was addressing.
I pointed out that I chose to make my Wall Street banker a woman because I like to make my examples female sometimes instead of defaulting to males all the time. As Mneme pointed out to me, it’s kind of obnoxious when you’re a woman to constantly hear everyone assuming that every role is somehow gendered, and that they’re almost always gendered male. Harder for girls to grow up thinking they can be bankers or lawyers or scientists or Presidents when the default pronoun to describe people in all those roles is “him”. So I try to mix that up by using female examples and male examples interchangeably – the gender of the Wall Street executive in my argument wasn’t relevant to the point I was trying to make.
She said that it made my point inaccurate, that I should have used “person” or “banker” or even “bankster” instead because that would be more accurate. At which point I lost it.
Here I have a person whose consistently poor communication skills cause frequent arguments, someone who has as little grasp on logic and rational discourse as the average second-grader – and she is going to tell me how to write and make a point? And be entirely wrong about it to boot? I don’t think so. I pointed out that “bankster” is a generally derogatory informal term, and therefore not accurate. And I told her that
If you think that I am going to take advice on how to communicate and construct an argument from you, you are even more profoundly mistaken than usual. That’s like a half-deaf blind dog that barks at every sound giving notes to Neruda.
On the one hand, I’m kind of proud of my snarkiness there. Not that I think I’m Neruda (I wish I were half as gifted), but still. As verbal backhands go, it’s not bad.
On the other hand, I realize that I’m responding to one of my Big Red Buttons. And that’s not a proud moment for me. I walked away from the conversation at that point, which was what I should have done initially. I have a strict “do not engage the Inflamer” policy. I made an exception, and I got a great reminder why I shouldn’t do that. Chalk one up for learning.
In the plus column: demonstrated verbal facility, delivered zinging putdown to an obnoxious person, walked away from a pointless battle (eventually).
In the minus column: looked kind of like a bully who can’t take even mild criticism.
Not a good balance. Not going on my list of bright shining moments to be proud of. (Not going in the shameful secrets file, either.) I let my Big Red Button get the best of me, which is of course what Big Red Buttons do.
And what we as humans trying to be good people do is try to identify those Big Red Buttons and manage them better. I’m not going to win Lauren Graham’s heart by being a jerk. (Don’t say it. Do NOT burst my bubble here, people.) Maybe I don’t have it in me to politely thank the Inflamer for her advice while going on with my conversation in my way, but I could certainly have just let it slide. I chose not to.
I’m a little more hair-triggery lately. Stress, depression, isolation – these things get to you. (The lighthouse dream dies a lingering death.) Something I need to watch out for, and work on.
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: “I will it!”
- Ayn Rand, Anthem
I’m not an Objectivist any more. But I can tell you that those words sum up a part of the appeal Rand and her ideas once held for me. The idea that my will, my choice, my mind had supremacy – it was all about me and what I wanted. And Rand told me over and over again that was okay.
I remember a day when I was in first or second grade, walking home from school. I don’t know how I got there, but I had two thoughts that have had a shaping impact on my life:
We’re always alone in our heads.
No one can make anyone do anything.
As close as we get to another person, as much as we know them and let them know us, there’s always an area where the circles on the Venn diagram don’t overlap. There’s always a point where you’re alone and you have to make decisions for yourself. And you get to do that – you never lose your ability to make a decision. Even with a gun in your face and someone’s finger on the trigger, you’re free to chose.
This isn’t to say that victims choose their victimhood. The gun is the violation: upping the ante for someone else so they’ll make the choice you want them to. It’s compelling someone else to renounce their free will and be your puppet. I’m saying that all the guns in the world can’t make you lift a finger if you value your freedom of choice more than your life. There’s no force on this Earth that can fire a single neuron for you.
My problem is that I would much rather be a stubborn ass and take the bullet (or pull the trigger myself) than make the smart choice. I am so determined to have my own way that I will do myself who knows how much damage rather than give an inch. I make petrified mules look like reeds in the wind.
Some of that stems from my issues with my father. I lived with someone who wouldn’t leave me the space to make my choices and be myself: there was his way or the highway. To this day he has no respect for or comprehension of boundaries, at least not when it comes to me. A few years ago I was visiting my parents, and for some reason Mom decided to touch my ear. For me, that’s something only a girlfriend gets to do – so it’s categorically off-limits for Mom. I firmly and politely asked her not to do that again, and when questioned I explained why. And rather than accept that I didn’t want to be touched like that, he had to try to explain why I was wrong.
Closing my bedroom door meant nothing to him: it was his house, and besides I didn’t have anything he hadn’t seen anyway. (I’ve never understood that logic: most adults have seen both of the major variations on body types, so really what does that have to do with privacy?) Any money in my piggy bank tended to be replaced with IOUs when I wasn’t looking, until I taught him not to do that any more. I had two dogs: he threw one over the fence, and abused and killed the other. What was mine was his, and what was his was only his. What he couldn’t command – the stuff between my ears – he bullied and berated. I can still remember the utter scorn and contempt he had for my writing.
Hence the appeal of Rand. After years of Dad’s nonsense, I wanted to have my life, my space, my choice. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do because I wanted to. I never did the teenage rebellion thing, so when someone could give me an intellectual justification for why I should do what I wanted to do I latched onto it. The fact that it was a pretty solipsistic and shallow kind of sanction took me a few years to figure out.
I learned stubbornness from a master. And I took it to the next level. He might be willing to sacrifice his firstborn on that altar (although he doesn’t see it that way), but I’m willing to cut my own throat and jump on the fire if it means making my own choice. I’ll cut off my nose to spite everyone else’s face, because it’s my nose. Mine. If I want to cut it off, I’ll cut it off.
But as idiotic as that is, I’m not actually an idiot. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know it’s not healthy. Most people don’t see every suggestion or preference expressed by the people who love them as a threat to their autonomy. Most people are willing to give a little more of that circle that’s “Me” to the overlap called “Us”, because they get so much more out of it than they give up: they get love, security, support, and all the rest of the stuff we have relationships for. Yes, the lighthouse-keeper gets a lot more time to himself. Also if he breaks his leg or just wants to play Uno he’s kinda screwed. Life is a series of tradeoffs.
One of the things I worked on in therapy was the idea of boundaries. Everyone has them: they’re necessary to protect the more vulnerable parts of ourselves. But there are screens and there are walls. A boundary doesn’t have to be rigid and absolute – it doesn’t take an impregnable fortress to keep the flies and mosquitoes out. Living healthily requires knowing when to put up a screen and when to put up wall. Call it threat assessment, or target discrimination, or maybe just learning to trust and open up. The Canadians haven’t attacked us in over 200 years, and there’s no reason why they should, so maybe a string of fortresses and razor-wire isn’t necessary.
My boundaries are almost always rigid. I’m the only house on the block with redundant moats, inner and outer keeps, overlapping fields of fire, minefields, razor wire, and a doomsday device even for the mailbox. My reaction to the man who would be my king is to reject government and commerce from behind walls the sun can barely summit. And even I’m not damaged enough to really think that’s healthy or necessary.
So there’s a Big Red Button there. I know that. The tire’s flat, and I have to get to work: should I
a) keep driving on a flat tire
b) pull over and complain about the injustice of a flat tire
c) pull over and then obsess over finding out what flattened the tire
d) pull over, fix the tire, and get on with my life
Doesn’t seem like a hard call. The past informs but does not define the future. All the complaining in the world won’t right a single wrong: moping time is misspent time. And it’s silly to pretend there’s no problem, especially when there’s a solution.
I need to take a step back when I feel that “oh really? watch me!” reaction coming on. I need to really weigh my choices by watching both sides of the balance. If all I’m going to do is look at the risk/cost side of the equation, it really doesn’t pay to get out of bed in the morning. But getting up means seeing the sun, playing with the Karamazovs, finding out what my clever and zany friends are up to, learning new things, thinking new thoughts. Staying behind the walls makes me think I’m a king of infinite space, but bounded in a nutshell is still bounded in a nutshell. I’m living Blake’s “mill with complicated wheels” because it’s easier for me rely on old defensive habits than learn how to open up and be healthy.
Time to want better and be better. There’s nothing wrong with wanting my own space and making my own choices. But that reflexive “no to whatever you said” is just reactionary nihilism. It’s spitting for the sake of spitting. It gets me no more space to be myself, and takes away a lot of what makes being a fundamentally and inextricably social animal so good. When you build a castle, you cede the lands beyond the walls. And I belong in those lands.
So I need to find new holy words. I need to take the holy off of “I will it” and put it where it belongs. (I haven’t worked out where that is yet.) I need to be less committed to thinking of my core as exclusively in that area no one can touch and more in an area that’s sometimes shared and sometimes not, depending on the relationship.
EDIT: And now, for no better reason than that this is what my iPod shuffled up and I happen to think it should have been the main theme song instead of the closing credits, here’s k.d. lang’s “Surrender” from the soundtrack to “Tomorrow Never Dies”.
I should be working on a writing job right now. But I’m feeling a bit irritable, and a bit of venting seems in order because the irritation is keeping me from focusing.
Two of my aunts often use their Facebook status updates to make political points. Generally this amounts to those “cut and paste this if you agree” reposts. Since my aunts (like most of my relatives) are much more conservative than I am, their posts tend to infuriate me.
Sometimes it’s because they’re bent out of shape over stuff that’s not even true: gangs using handicapped people and children as bait to kidnap women in mall parking lots, President Obama cancelling the National Day of Prayer, and how you can get AIDS from a handshake if you don’t say three Hail Marys and drink a guava-strawberry smoothie with your left hand while hopping on your right foot.
Okay, I made that last one up. But you get the point. It’s chain e-mails all over again. And no matter how many times I point it out to them, they never think to check Snopes to see if their friend’s friend’s cousin’s attorney’s neighbor might have it wrong. Heaven forbid they even do a little Googling to see if maybe this stuff is just crazy talk, or perhaps exaggerated by the telephone effect. The way data moves these days, you can go from “Polly Noonan lost ten dollars at the casino last night with her dog Millie” to “Paul Newman left ten million dollars to start a dog casino” in no time flat.
Last night’s repost was about the new Florida law requiring individuals who apply for assistance under Florida’s administration of the federal TANF grant to pass drug tests. If they have kids and fail the test, someone else can be designated to receive the funds for their kids. But not a penny for them until they can pee clean, God-fearing American pee like stand-up citizens. My aunts think this is great: “Let’s get Welfare back to the one’s who NEED it, not those that just WANT it.” I’ve no idea who got them reposting this, but the aunts who didn’t re-post that liked it.
Let’s take a look at that. Johnny Spoon and Bonnie Fork were high school sweethearts. They have a little too much peach schnapps after the prom and Bonnie winds up pregnant. They graduate and get married that summer. Bonnie stays home with little baby Gaga, while Johnny gets a job to pay the bills. It’s a lot of stress, being a 19-year-old high school graduate trying to support a family. He wanted to go to college and become a Web millionaire. Bonnie was going to be an optometrist. Johnny makes a bad choice and starts doing drugs. Now he’s addicted, and it’s hard for him to hold down a job. It’s even harder in a bad economy.
Bonnie loves him, but she can’t take care of him and the baby. She’s just a kid herself. And she won’t have drugs around her little girl. She has to leave with baby Gaga and move back in with her parents.
Johnny’s not a bad guy. He wants to work and do right. But now his brain is wired to demand a certain kind of chemical stimulation. And as badly as he wants to get off drugs and be the man he needs to be, he can’t: his brain can no more stop screaming for a fix than his stomach could for food. It’s not a lack of will or a weakness of character. It’s one bad decision compounded by a cruel trick of biochemistry.
And now he can’t get help from the state to make ends meet. He can’t keep a job, he can’t keep a roof over his head, and before long he’s on the streets with millions of others. The farther he gets from the rest of us, the farther he gets from the possibility of help. The longer he stays out there on the streets, the better the chances are he’ll turn to crime and wind up in prison or worse.
Are we really willing to shut the door on all the Johnnys out there? Are we really willing to write them off for one mistake? Yes, Johnny made the wrong choice when he started doing drugs. But he can’t make that right on his own anymore. He physically can’t break the hold those nasty little molecules have on his neurons. (Ask yourself why the first of the Twelve Steps is admitting your powerlessness before your addiction.) It’s easy to let our non-addicted brains think, “Well, he just needs to grow a spine, haul himself up by his bootstraps, and apply a little elbow grease.” But until you’ve lived inside a brain that doesn’t work right you can’t possibly know what it’s like. I’ve had a taste of it with my own serotonin-starved brain, and there’s a sense of powerlessness there that taints everything you think or do: you can’t trust your own consciousness. I can’t imagine what it would be like to need something that I know is destroying my life and slowly killing me.
It’s also worth noting that the goals for the TANF block grants don’t say anything about “drug eradication”. It’s not a priority for the federal government to make sure only “clean” people get help. And it’s their money.
Part of me wants to argue all this with my aunts. It’s not just that their short-sighted lack of compassion offends me in ways that would have surprised me a few years ago. I feel like I need to Fight the Good Fight. The more we let our White Whales and Big Red Buttons dictate policy, the worse we’ll make our policies. And the more we stand back in silence while the ignorant and ill-tempered spew vitriol at the voiceless and defenseless, the worse things get for “the least of these“. And after all these years of appeasement, of hiding who I am and letting them think I’m still one of them, I feel an almost desperate desire to carve out a space for my true self. I get to breathe, too.
Part of me thinks it makes more sense to “drop the rope”, as Mneme says. I’m not going to change their minds. They were raised in pretty much the same conservative, fundamentalist Christian background I was. And they’ve had a lot more practice and indoctrination than I have. They are pretty firmly set in their ways, and they are pretty firmly convinced that this is the way God would want things. Kind of hard to argue with that.
Someone at that Other Place suggested I should let it go. Their beliefs are rooted in story, not truth, so there’s no point arguing with them. (She’s a big believer in Eckhard Tolle, of whom I know very little. Also she’s an inveterate and frequently illogical arguer, which is both annoying and funny, but that’s neither here nor there.) In this case she’s right. We all have narratives we’ve written to make sense of our lives. “Punish the wicked” is a bigger theme in theirs than mine, and nothing I do will persuade them to edit their narratives to make room for a little more mercy. They will filter every argument through their narrative, even though I’m trying to show them that it’s the narrative itself that needs changing.
And if I’m being honest with myself, part of my desire to argue with them is rooted in that same “punish the wicked” theme. I’m just more inclined to swing the axe than cheer the headsman, and I have my own ideas about whose necks need cutting. But as Nietzsche wrote, “distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful”. (I really should finish Zarathustra sometime.) That reflexive “no” isn’t the best approach.
That’s really the heart of it: not the reflexive “no” or the automatic “yes”. Making conscious moral choices instead of relying on knee-jerk responses. Sailing over your emotional waves, learning to ride them out. It’s easy to say “no welfare for scummy druggies”, and it’s easy to say “you’re wrong, you narrow-minded, short-sighted, heartless jerks”. But the right thing to do is take a step back, think it through, and proceed with well-earned calm and confidence.
