About Rudeness
posted at 1:11 am
on Jul. 14, 2010
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Back in the Saddle
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(Not) Taking a Break
My friends have a cat, an old and lovely cat, that has lived with them for a long, long time.
The cat was getting old, but they thought she was doing fairly well for her age. Then, one day, they got a new TV and thereby changed the layout of their furniture.
Well, it became suddenly very clear that their cat had become blind. Not completely blind, but certainly blind enough that she was walking directly into the newly reorganized furniture. She was used to the static contours of her own life and her own home, and she wasn’t prepared for the change. Her behavior, fine in one setting, gave away her true infirmity in another.
Meanwhile…
I’m a fairly decent driver. I admit I have leftover L.A. driving habits, which means I’m less submissive than B.C. drivers and tend to adhere to a higher speed limit than what’s posted. But I’m safe and patient and kind, and I get irate at people on the road who drive dangerously, selfishly and (w?)recklessly. They, to my mind, are jerks.
Jerks are not limited to the road. There are jerks all over the place. They are in the line at the Safeway near my house—for instance, just recently I stood behind a guy who berated the checkout guy and the manager so hard and for so long, that even though he was wrong about the sale price of a smoked ham, the manager gave him $8 off just to go away. He was a jerk.
There are jerks on TV, there are jerks on the bus and on the ultimate field and down the street, and there are jerks commenting on this blog (though not you, dear reader).
Until recently, I thought that as far as jerks go, it was us vs. them. Solidarity, my brothers and sisters! But—and here’s where the cat comes back into the story—the furniture in my life has been moving around lately, and I see that as time has passed, I’ve turned out to be somewhat blind, and I’m a jerk hitting the furniture of my existing relationships.
* * *
Reader, how many people aren’t talking to you? For me, that answer used to be: “Sorry, what do you mean?” You see, I couldn’t even imagine a world in which someone I cared for wasn’t talking to me. Estranged, I think is the polite way to put it, or feuding, if it’s even less civilized. Right now, for me, the list is as long as it’s ever been.
There are four people on it, and they are both family and friends—I still consider them friends, even if they don’t reciprocate—and I was going to list them here, except Susie asked me not to, and she also pointed out the irony explosion if I re-offended anyone by writing a post about being insensitive.
Not speaking to someone—how much of a jerk must I be to draw that sort of a response, heh? Can you imagine what it would take to get one of your own friends or family members never to speak to you again?
* * *
Those non-speakers, though, are just the ones who have drawn a line in the sand. There are a few more, who haven’t even told me they aren’t speaking to me, who just .... aren’t there any more. It’s radio silence, like when a cell phone converser drives into a gulley.
And beyond that, I know there are others who think I’m rude, insensitive, tone-deaf, difficult, impatient, that my expectations are too high, that I’m odd and oblivious and robotic. Some of the things I’ve been told recently: “exceptionally rude, even for you” and “it feels like you are completely oblivious”—that’s two different friends in the span of a few days. At a certain point, the message gets to be unignorable.
But just noticing something isn’t enough. One has to do something about it, too.
* * *
Sitting in the crowd recently at my sister Virginia’s graduation, I listened to speeches about “the future” and “being at a crossroads” and “sacrifices”; the standard graduation topics, though done, I will say, quite well. But one speech made me sit up and take notice it resonates still weeks later.
That was the idea that our current technology, and our current way of living, puts emphasis on the Me, on the self. That Facebook would not have succeeded 50 years ago even if the technology had been available, because people were not focused inward, on sharing themselves; they were able to focus on each other.
This speechifier was exhorting the graduates to reach outwards, to be patient and kind and considerate, and to spend the emotional and social capital they had built up in college by investing it in others.
Empathy—I’m using William Ickes definition of empathy: “A complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others.”—has never been my strong point. I’ve gotten better at seeming empathetic over time, but even today I can tell that empathy often escapes me the way non-native language speakers strain to follow a heated argument or clever sitcom.
So I’m trying a new plan. I’m going to ask two simple questions now before everything I do or say:
1) Who is going to be affected by this?
2) If I were that person (or those people), how will I feel when this takes effect?
And then, I’m going to make sure my behavior takes that into account.
Perhaps only a two-question analysis is overly simplistic, but we jerks sometimes need things laid out for us simply.
(Notice, also, that these questions use both affect and effect. That will help me remember both steps.)
So stay tuned, and to those of you I’ve been a reprobate to, stick around and give me another try. I’m curious to see if I can move the needle on this aspect of myself, and you, dear reader, will have a front row seat.
