attitudes and annoyances

I've been thinking a lot about people's attitudes this past week, and about some of the strange and seemingly irrational things people do.

I've been called on to be a "peacemaker" again between my colleague and his (now-former) student; there's some blowback from ownership of part of a project. From where I stand, it looks like neither of them is fully in the right. I reminded my colleague (the only one I came into direct contact with this past week; he was the one who came griping to me about "my student is at it again" that I was doing this to help him out, I was doing it over and above my workload, I am not going to see any additional money, publications, research, or even, it seems, goodwill out of it, and I am doing it merely because it means getting a student who has several years invested towards an M.S. done and out.

(And I also thought, but did not add: so I don't have to hear you coming and griping to me any more).

My feelings were somewhat justified by a fellow colleague of ours - a good friend of mine, we teach a class together every fall - who is also involved; he remarked that both of the parties were behaving badly. I made some comment about, yeah, I'm 10 years younger than the youngest of them and I still have to be the grownup. And he said, that's exactly what I was going to say, but you beat me to it.

I don't know. It frustrates me always having to be the grownup, especially in situations where if you use a single slightly-wrong turn of phrase around someone - by mistake - it will come back and bite you on the ass.

And there's more super-annoying blowback from the congregational split WHICH IS NOW FOUR YEARS AGO THANK YOU VERY MUCH. The split was basically between the super-conservative-theologically people - the Bible literalists - and those of us who choose a slightly more open interpretation. (But really, it was over money. The group that left wanted greater control of the money in investments; they wanted to tap into them and spend them on things that the rest of the congregation felt was an irresponsible use of money and were not in keeping with the goals of the congregation).

Well, the group that left - they have spread rumors about us ever since. That we condone certain immoralities. That we don't believe Jesus is God. That we don't believe in the Resurrection.

And the upsetting thing about this is - NONE of those things is even remotely true. Anyone who's ever been in our services can see that the second and third of those things are patently false. And as for the first - well, we take the attitude of "love the sinner but hate the sin" but that does not extend to "shunning" people who do certain things.

And the thing is? One of the people actually TOOK AWAY A FAMILY THAT HAD JOINED US. This person actually got them believing in those lies - well, it may be partly because one of the adults in the family worked for her - but they've apparently left us. And that makes me angry and sad and all mixed up because - these folks WORKED with me in the youth program. They taught Sunday school. They heard the sermons. How could they come to believe that we don't believe in Jesus?

I guess the thing that frustrates me the most is that until the church split - and to a certain extent, even after - I thought pretty highly of this individual. But now - it's a real disillusionment. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to avoid people, to avoid forming friendships or getting attached because you can almost never know who's going to stick the knife in when your back's turned or not.

(That said: one fellow I know pretty well at church, who's grown up here among these folks, did comment to me "Mrs. X, she's always been the kind of person you don't want to be on the wrong side of, and she always likes to get exactly what she wants." He was angry at what she did but didn't seem all that surprised.)

I guess deep down in a lot of ways I'm pretty naive about human nature. I tend to expect people who are older than I am to behave with greater maturity than I posess. I expect people over the age of, say, 25, to be reasonable. And it frustrates me - and genuinely surprises me and disappoints me - when they don't. Oh, I know there are people who do stupid stuff - but I can kind of write them off because a lot of them are people I don't know: the criminals I hear about on the news, the stupid political commentators. Somehow they're not really REAL to me. But it hurts when someone you knew - someone you ate meals with and talked with and laughed with - behaves in such an inexplicable (to me at least) way.

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Sort of related, but sort of not - I was watching Dinesh D'Souza on Book TV this afternoon. Now, I don't agree with the man on everything but he has some intersting opinions and he articulates them well. And you know, I have to also give the man props for the way he responded to some of the callers. Like many people commenting on matters political, racial, and social, he gets some of the froth-mouthed callers calling in - lots of people with their own personal hobby horses to ride (One man, calling in, talking about abortion being equivalent to Naziism, when D'Souza had not mentioned abortion at all. D'Souza remarked that the Nazi equivalent was going a bit far). He also got a guy calling in who said he had never read D'Souza's book, but that he was wrong anyway. (And later on, it turned out that some of the points, they actually agreed on.) And then there was a woman who called in who started a long rambling ad hominem attack, centered on the fact that D'Souza (who is East Indian) had married a white woman, and that somehow pointed to a psychological defect in the man.

That was the point where D'Souza got pissed off (and well he should). He remarked - rather coldly - that the woman didn't know him, and the fact of the matter that he married a white woman was Because. He. Fell. In. Love. With. Her.

D'Souza also made a couple of points I find interesting:

First - he said that there are essentially two ways of dealing with racism (or sexism, or whatever other roadblock is thrown up): you can agitate or you can navigate. You can agitiate - you can march and shout and demand and tell people how wrong they are. Or you can try to find your way around the problem, to kind of shrug your shoulders and think "It's an imperfect world and I will do the best I can in it."

And although I'd say there probably was a time and a place for agitation - for example, if laws are truly unjust, you probably can't negotiate around them - for example, if you're disenfranchised, you can't find an alternate way to vote. But, he said, much of what people regard as racism today is something that could perhaps just as easily be negotiated around - that you can find an alternate way. Like the old feminist saw that a woman has to work twice as hard as a man to be thought half as good - but fortunately, that's not hard.

I don't know. I do realize that many would point out that as a white woman - even more, an upper-middle-class white woman - I have no right to talk about racism. But I think as a woman in a largely male-dominated field (the sciences), I do see the agitation/negotiation tradeoff. I knew women - not at my current place of employment but in the past, at other places - who were ready to claim sexism or sexual harrassment every time they were even slightly thwarted in their endeavours. And there was one prof, in grad school, who was well-known as a bit of a sexist. And I needed something from him. And I found, that when I went and politely asked, and agreed to his terms (that I not remove the book - it was a rare book I needed information from - from the room where he kept it), he was perfectly reasonable and didn't give me any problems.

One thing I've learned is that politeness goes a long way towards getting what you want.

The other comment D'Souza made - and this was in response to the angry woman, who in addition to basically accusing him of being mentally ill for marrying outside of his "race" - was that his perspective as an "outsider" was perhaps different from those of "insiders." He pointed out that he compared the experience of non-whites in the U.S. to the experience of minority groups in Uganda or Albania or other places on Earth, whereas some of the "agitators" were comparing them to the Garden of Eden - in other words, perspective is everything.

And I've seen that. I guess I tend to be a bit of a Pollyanna, where I look at situations and go, "Well, it could be worse." or "You know, I'm pretty lucky." And other people in similar situations can find things to complain about, or things that are wrong, and they let those things color their entire experience - they can't find any joy because, so to speak, there's a single pea under their mattress.

And D'Souza was pretty gracious to the woman (considering what she was saying to him) but he also added: we are looking through different lenses. Your view does not make you virtuous and me evil. (Note that he didn't say "right" and "wrong" or "correct" and "mistaken." I do think there are some political perspectives that are wrong, generally because they are based on bad data or a flawed interpretation. Which is why I get so angry when I read about some thinktank or lobbyist group using numbers that aren't exactly fact-checked or that have been "tweaked" a little...because it's lying to someone, perhaps even worse than lying, in my opinion, to get them to believe things based on bad data. Now that I think of it: not at all unlike the former-church-member situation I talked about above).

And that strikes me, that those two things together - the difference of perspective not being "evil," at least provided it is not based on lies, and the fact that people can be more of a pessimist or more of an optimist - seem to combine to make a lot of the really vitriolic and hateful political debate that you see.

But I don't know. I go through cycles of expecting people to be reasonable, and then having those expectations completely destroyed. I don't know how to break the cycle, how to move to some kind of an acceptance that people are, practically speaking, kind of screwed up, kind of immature, and it's pointless for me to expect reasonableness from them - and how to deal with that lack of expectation.