Realistic Idealist

Wouldn’t it be awesome if human beings were as inherently good as I believe they are AND sufficiently aware and accountable to realize that that’s just not always enough?  We want to be part of a civil society, and some of us want to go to college, take really challenging classes, and learn from them.  Because people have differing experiences and habits, and because some are just paying more attention than others, hell, because some are just smarter than others (sorry, it’s true), we cannot simply depend on this magical “goodness” to enable consistently positive outcomes in either setting, at least according to Thomas Hobbes.

There was an elderly woman named Anna who lived in the next house down the alley from us when we moved into town.  I was maybe 16 years old. Her front porch faced the cross street, and she was usually out there.  I usually came and went via the alley, which took me right past her porch.  EVERYBODY said she was mean as a damn snake, and she did usually look pretty grim and didn’t ever wave to anybody.  Well, one day it occurred to me to wave to her, and she waved back.  It made me wonder, for all the bitching everybody did about how she just wouldn’t give, how long it had been since anybody waved to her, much less without expecting a big party for it.  So I started waving every time and saying hello when I’d walk by or ride by on my bike.  It wasn’t long before I got big smiles and waves almost every time, and when I saw her get mad, it was always on the heels of some kids traipsing across her yard or through her flowers or otherwise just being asses.  And then they’d call her “mean” because she didn’t just take it, because they weren’t allowed to just do whatever they wanted, even as they were proving that they couldn’t be trusted with such a privilege.  It bothered me.  Turns out that some principles have always been important to me, even before I knew what they were.

It seems to keep coming up.  Every so often I encounter another person who is just nakedly honest about who they are, in a really good and decent way that’s truly rare in the modern world, such as it is; who gets hurt by somebody taking advantage of that; takes back some privilege that was only ever just that – a privilege, never a right; and then gets emotionally bitch-slapped for it.  We cannot ask people to behave a certain way with us and then fault them for giving us what we asked, at least not if we really want what we claim to want.  We cannot presumptuously superimpose our favorite roles on situations where they don’t fit, or expect people to just accept whatever crap we want to pile on a wagon they offered to help us pull.  Just because we prefer to wear shorts and wear them all the time in Florida doesn’t somehow guarantee that we can wear them to North Dakota in February and not get our asses frostbitten.  And if it happens, it’s not North Dakota’s fault and certainly not Florida’s for lulling us into a false sense of security.  No, under the circumstances, we are solely to blame for our frostbitten asses.

The past couple months have expanded on this single lesson, which gets revisited at least twice a week.  I have this really amazing teacher who makes interesting and memorable (a perk in education) a subject that’s pretty challenging and some would even say boring (although not I, because I am, as my wife says, a law junkie).  This AWESOME teacher has been accused of being “mean,” “unfair,” “biased,” etc., and to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect in her class, but to my credit, I was committed to finding out for myself.  I’m familiar with “user error,” and at MTSU, in my experience, 99% of negative comments are just that, 100% if they’re about the political science faculty I’ve been lucky enough to have so far, and I came in totally unsold.

Still, I was unprepared for the extent to which it’s been proven this semester.  In what is perhaps the most unfortunately clear kind of reconciliation of contradicting reports, in what seems like every class, she tells us about some new rule she’s had to make about an assignment or other requirement because she found out that some freedom or generosity she had previously afforded has been maimed by somebody or collection of somebodies.  The correlational meaning is too obvious to be missed, unless you have your eyes squeezed shut just for that purpose.  And just so things don’t get hazy, feel free to review shorts analogy above, here and throughout.  It’s not our professors’ responsibility to be dictators; we don’t even want them to be, remember?  On the contrary, it’s our responsibility to be, well, responsible.

So how do you “be friends” with your teachers?  You don’t.  Period.  You BE accountable, respectful, conscientious students.  You work hard and you follow the rules necessary to maintaining order within that setting so that you don’t jeopardize the needs and experiences of everybody involved.  You not only tolerate but embrace and celebrate your professor’s hard work, intelligence, and, yes, authority, and the volume you still have to learn from her, which you asked for and bought for yourself.

If you have a natural inclination toward a “friendship” with the person in the hall who was your professor just inside the room you just left, then by all means, BE friends there, or in the office or parking lot or bar down the street or wherever, but don’t forget that there is a very real, physical threshold that you cross between the two realms.  When you go back into that room, it’s your responsibility to assume the role that is, by necessity, yours in that environment.  It is not your professor’s responsibility to entertain the role you wish you had, the one that’s more fun and feels like some kind of secret pass that was provided to make your life easier.

And if you can’t handle the balance, if stratification’s just not your strong suit or you’re just uncomfortable with it, then by all means, get out.  Walk away.  No harm, no foul.  Do not take your wounded ego to the cafeterias and faculty reviews and emails and social media “status” updates and blame somebody else for your disappointed sense of entitlement created by your error in moving a boundary you were never invited (if you reflect on it honestly) to move.  If you’re lucky enough to have a professor with whom you could and would want to be friends – because he or she is wicked smart, fun and easy to talk to, maybe actually earned a Ph.D. for the knowledge and not the self-importance, is good in a way you only find in a couple of people every few years or so – then for crying out loud, value that, protect it.  Treat those bonuses with the respect and care they deserve, instead of trying to beat the wonder out of them because you misapplied it and didn’t like the feeling of the natural consequence.

In other words, if you’re angry because somebody let you down, you need to be damn sure it wasn’t you before you start howling about it in the street.  You need to be damn sure a criticism wasn’t warranted, or possibly just a very human response to being misused and then blamed for it, maybe for the tenth time that day, something we call hurt feelings.  And if it’s the latter, and it really isn’t about you, then why not try talking to this person you were so hot to call a friend and sorting it out before going to one of the aforementioned, counterproductive alternatives.

The rules are there for a reason — so you don’t just whack people over the head and take their apples because you feel like a little snack.  It does not matter at all whether or not you’re one of those people; they exist and are present, therefore so must be the rules that protect the people with the apples, especially the ones who are willing to share.

Just in case truth and fairness aren’t enough motivation…what exactly do you think you win, if you succeed in “correcting” this familiarity and humility and human warmth you don’t know how to handle?  Is your world really better for having convinced somebody that you can’t be trusted with certain liberties and sometimes just kindnesses?  I know with certainty that it’s for the worst if we ever convince her to stop offering them.  Wouldn’t it be better to simply entertain by choice all of the social rules you want to believe exist for others and spend your time in an environment that’s mutually selfless and respectful AND optimally conducive to what you came to it seeking?  Wouldn’t it be better to prove Hobbes wrong, for a change?

So the big anniversary of September 11 is over, thank goodness.  Yes, it was a tremendously shocking loss of life, the lives of thousands of my fellow Americans.  Yes, I remember where I was.  Yes, I was scared and heartbroken and enraged.  And yes, I would call myself a patriot.

I’m just not a fan of the whole “anniversary” thing.  I understand that for singular events, that’s the point on which we anchor the event in question, but most events can’t really, or at least shouldn’t be, anchored on a single day, this one included.  It suggests that the most relevant aspects of it weren’t equally so the day before or won’t be equally so the day after.  It lets us off the hook for ignoring the importance of the event for the past 10, 15, 50 years, however long it’s been since whatever we “celebrate” happened.  It suggests that we’re not susceptible to an identical event every second of every other day of the year (we are) and that there’s no choice anywhere between forgetting it and being a slave to it (there is).

We were supposed to know why we were a great country on September 10,2001, and before, actually should have never lost sight of it for the past, oh…more than 200 years.  We’ve blown that one repeatedly.  At the very least, we should’ve been able to hold the reminder for at least the past 10, maybe even make a little progress, but look around.  Take a second to really take in the political climate today, not to mention the social climate, of our supposedly great country.  Shouldn’t we be able to see the lessons of 2001?

We’re still blaming the Muslim population at large for the acts of a few who happened to share that characteristic.  Some of us still have to travel to one of a handful of states just to marry the person with whom we plan to spend the rest of our days, only to return “home” where it doesn’t even count.  Is it really that great to be SO patriotic that we’d color the name of our lost loved one onto an American flag or across the names of countless others who were equally loved and equally lost, without giving it a second thought?  We continue to shred a president who’s hardly had even a chance to make a mistake while lauding a president who made many and kept some respect anyway, as well as touting as hopefuls several candidates who seem to have never even read the Constitution.  We vow to “never forget” with the same passion we vow “never again” to allow genocide, while forgetting and allowing even as I type this.

It could be different.  We could stop waiting for the big 5- and 10-year marks commemorating our various tragedies to act like the United States.  We could just LIVE as the “patriots” we claim to be — as the smarter, kinder, gentler Americans we advertise with our bumper stickers and t-shirts and giant foam fingers.  We could lead instead of coerce.  We could tolerate instead of condemn.  We could be proud without being arrogant and insensitive.  We could underpin our nation instead of undermining it.  Hell, just for starters, we could give blood a few times a year, instead of giving once every terrorist attack and ignoring the Red Cross’s pleas for donors for the decade or more in between, or worse, simply spending the energy attacking that organization for being greedy and bureaucratic, as though we’re doing anything better to help in a crisis or, for that matter, doing anything at all.  The still civically comatose third of us could start VOTING…that’d be “patriotic,” wouldn’t it, being engaged in that whole business of being a “democratic republic”? In other words, we could be the best of what we saw on September 11, 2001, every day.

With a few exceptions, way too much of what I saw and heard and read yesterday failed to celebrate patriotism as much as it did fear and heartbreak and rage, a focus that’s already been exhausted daily for some time now.  To me, the real tragedy would be in waiting another 10 years to take another shot at doing it differently.

That could say “probable” if you people would get on board with the idea. Nobody’s claiming that true balance is an easy thing to achieve or maintain, but it can be done. We can expect the best of people without being crushed when they don’t produce it. We can also prepare for disaster without expecting it to hit. We can be grateful for what we have, where we are, how far we’ve come…without settling for only that. We can do better, and it’s never too late to start.