Something happened along the way.
The methodology for crafting a better world turned into a method of sport.
We started voting the weakest link off the island. The pretty girl, even if she is sweet and a wonderful cook wasn’t going to get the bachelor, and the extremely talented isn’t going to be a part of next weeks entertainment because they didn’t get enough phone votes.
There is a neighborhood bar not far from my house. There is always football on in the winter and baseball in the summer although you can’t hear the commentary because the juke box and conversation from neighborly strangers is more important than the last play.
It is a blue-collar bar. The people in there fix air conditioners, sell flooring, or they drive a delivery truck, you get the idea. People like me with a polo shirt and dockers are welcome but no one there is going to belittle me and show me the door just because I might harbor some suggestions on how our local governing bodies can make traffic better or improve garbage collection.
Most of the dockers and polo shirt crowd would call this a place a “shit hole”. There is no karaoke, the bar tenders don’t use a cork screw to serve drinks, and it is just across the county line so smokers are welcome. Not exactly the contemporary white-collar hangout.
This particular bar I’m telling you about I hadn’t been in for over a year. Last week I decided to stop by and drown some sorrows I’ve bee suppressing and I noticed there were a number of improvements. There was more lighting, a wall had been taken out and a room added for a pool table and assorted video console games, some new table and chairs that didn’t rock so much.
I’m guessing that someone convinced the owner that her place was thought of as a “shit hole” so her staff made some improvements.
Question: How do you get a teenage boy to recognize his room is truly a mess, unfit for humans to reside? Get a teenage girl to say ‘yuck’. All the preaching by his mother isn’t going to work, not until he recognizes that there is a problem will he address it.
The principle always works.
Not until an acholic recognizes he or she has a problem, when a drug-user hits ‘rock bottom’, not until the car breaks down on the interstate will someone admit the problem they have been ignoring needs to be addressed.
Not to be the simple stick-in-your-eye partisan on Facebook like everyone else I wrote a joke about a potential Saturday Night Live skit where leaders of different countries around the world were sitting in a circle of folding chairs admitting to one another that they had let their countries turn into something that was just ugly in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world.
I thought it was a somewhat funny joke that would help people who only want to point out the bad in today’s world that some things could manifest themselves as a positive.
You know, like a teenage girl telling a teenage boy his room stinks. Maybe he’ll recognize it as a problem and do something about it, and in a way that sticks; as opposed to when his mom complains the room gets cleaned, but two weeks later…
It was an intellectual joke, or at least I thought it was.
Facebook gave me the venue to float my joke; and open exchange of ideas between learned adults might see through the rhetoric behind the presidential comments being smeared in every direction.
Trying to bring focus back to the real issue.
The post got a few likes, perhaps less than ten. A couple of ‘that was funny’ comments but not much more.
Then early morning two days later someone employed the ‘vote him off the island’ tactics with an all-out personal attack.
Because of my attempt at humor everything was called into question.
All of a sudden, I’m a racist, my parents were racists, my grandparents were racists. My personal status in our society was only based on the privileges bestowed upon me because of the color of my skin and not the fact that I put myself through college by spending twenty-years in the army. My attitude towards my fellow man were brought into strict question. Because of my attempt at humor a solid ‘off the island’ vote was cast by a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance.
The saddest part of this is the gentlemen who posted the retort is a brilliant guy. He could have attempted to articulate where or why my joke was inappropriate and expound on his understanding of the world as he has experienced it.
January 1968, thirty-two years ago (from this posting) I was advancing my way through French Command School during one of the coldest European winters on record; the same month the Space Shuttle Challenger. I’ve stood for those in third-world “shit-hole” countries defending them from those who would push them down further into oblivion. I’ve followed the orders of men and women, color or not, who were my leaders guiding me to defend freedom. I’ve suffered the business end of a knife keeping women from being forced into situations of sexual assault or worse.
I kowtow to no man, to no woman, to no religion or political ideology.
I’m not upset either; my attempt at these thousand-or-so words is to point out that having an opinion is everyone’s reaction according to their own world opinion; but if your opinion is based on real-world experiences then please provide a retort that isn’t an attack.
Don’t attack, engage. Don’t belittle, uplift. Don’t preach, embrace.
Consider the content of another’s character or at the very least the courtesy of their perspective before casting your vote.
I’m still on the island. I still have an opportunity for the really cool bachelorette. If it weren’t for my arthritic hands and failing voice I might get enough votes to appear next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment