Friday, June 15, 2012

Offensive.

Recently, it turned out that I was offensive. This was totally by accident. I am normally offensive only due to my tendency to eat my own hands and interrupt suddenly with excitement. This time I had an offensive opinion.

It may mean that I stepped over an arbitrary line. Which might be good. Or it may mean I'm just an ass. Which might be bad. I would like to officially apologize in the second case and stick my fingers in my ears and make raspberries in the first. Whichever applies, please accept that response.

Here's what I find offensive. I will tell you because this is my blog. I own this piece of real estate on the Interwebs, like a troll under a bridge. I have created it to be a nice place–a place for thought and sharing–and invited nice, intelligent people into it. They have been and are lovely. They all, to a one, have either said sweet things or bit their tongue about this offensiveness. Mostly the second. Elsewhere, people are not so sweet. Democracy does not demand either politeness or sweetness. Fair enough.

I digress. Here is what I find offensive: throwing pig's blood. Calling people Nazis. Saying faggot. These things are obviously offensive. Here are some less obviously offensive things: Trying to shut people up by assaulting their character and motives. Saying or implying "Love the sinner, hate the sin." What "Love the sinner, hate the sin" really means, even though it is markedly better than hating the sinner, is that this "sinner" are fundamentally flawed, but I will overlook it. I don't love this attitude when it hails from the faith community toward the gay community. I will tell you where I like it even less. When I hear it from those who preach freedom and equality toward those whose religious views are offensive to them. This seems to me like a rigged request for tolerance. Yours to me, not mine for you. "I grant that you have the right to your religion, but it is crazy and it is bad. Your religion, from top to bottom, end to end, is offensive to me. But, you have a right to it."

Tolerance, I have recently learned is a dirty word. Tolerance must not be tolerated. Nothing will do but total agreement and complete acquiescence.Tolerance, though, had a long and proud history before it met its death in the graveyard of words that can no longer be safely used. It means "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own." It means "freedom from bigotry." Nasty stuff, that tolerance.

Before I was a laundress of words, pounding out soap suds onto the internet, I was a hippie tree hugging eco-mama. In that capacity, I sat with a group of blue-collar backbone of America beer-drinking gentlemen and a bunch of environmental activists and was given the job to come up with a plan to restore a local creek, for people and for salmon, with community buy-in. My qualifications for this were all expressed in granola and dewy-eyed idealism. I had to learn to sing Kumbayah with the rednecks. Here is what I learned in trying: Listen for the commitment. When drunken community members phoned me to rant and rave about how hippies had stolen their summer dam and they couldn't swim in the creek anymore, I listened to what they were really saying: I love my community. I want it to be a beautiful place. I ignored the vitriole and I answered that commitment. In the end, we restored the creek.

Here is what I hear now:

I want to be honored for who I am and for society to grant that it is OK.

I don't want to be tolerated; I want my rights.

I do not want to see gay children or teenagers harmed by expectations they cannot or should not meet.

I want to protect myself from the possibility of nefarious motives.

I want to know what side I'm on and what side I'm against.


And here is what I here from the other side of the fray:

My beliefs are important and valuable to me.

I have a right to make a choice.

I want to be accepted at face value and not seen as out for something I am not.

My path is valid, too.

No one, on either side of a disagreement or misunderstanding, is likely to one day throw up their hands and denounce their long-held point of view. Even less likely is that an entire institution will do so. Day after day, week after week I read complaints about the increasing divisions of our society, the snarled political system, the deepened racism, classism, and class warfare. Nobody seems to think the answer is for them to listen.

It has always been the only answer. Listen. Listen not for what you can object to. Listen not for what your next point of leverage in the argument will be. Listen for the commitment. Listen deeper and you will hear it echoes your own. There's only one commitment: to love and to be loved.





18 comments:

  1. Amen and hallelujah! I think you just shouted "penis!"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A revival! AMEN! HALLELUJAH! PENIS! The rallying uniting cries of love.
      Oh and here's that penis reference for the confused...
      http://peripheralimages.blogspot.com/2012/06/hubbub.html

      Delete
  2. I'll second your "penis!" because it's fun to do and I'll raise you a quote from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." Listening and loving, it seems, are not just touchy feely things. Perhaps it makes good business sense, too.

    Also, are opinions offensive? Attitudes, words, and actions yes. But opinions? Hm. Perhaps I'll start looking more closely at my own. Or maybe not.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MARGI! Did you see that she and Periphery are both echoing our phone convo?? Floored me. xoxo Love. The bottom line.

      Tara... I loved this piece. So complex and challenging, particularly to this fairly opinionated girl. LOL You have given me some things to reconsider, like the differences between tolerance and acceptance.

      Okay, I cannot sign off without saluting your word choices... Laundress of words? LOVE it. Granola and dewy-eyed idealism? Beautiful.

      Delete
    2. One more thing... listening for the commitment. Brilliant. To me this feels or sounds like keying in on motivation, which might be about the same.

      Delete
    3. Margi, I think an opinion/idea probably can be offensive because, just off the top of my head, I can think of a bunch which offend me, such as "whites are superior to blacks," "women need to keep their legs closed if they don't want to have a child" etc. Of course, I only know about them because they were voiced, so you could say the words were offensive. Opinions probably are nothing more than an assemblage of words. I think that powerful quote is originally from the Prayer of St. Francis (which it turns out was not written by St. Francis, but I digress.) I love that quote.

      Marie, I think what I'm saying is mostly the same as keying into motivation, except there is one qualification I might make: people have all sorts of motivations, many of them dark and selfish, lots of time hidden from their own view. When you see their motivation, many times you see these things there, too. Listening for the commitment is more of a creative act. You have to listen past the noise until all you hear is the basic human need behind the motivation. If they are trying to promote themselves, for instance, the question is why are they doing that? It will be to fulfill some commitment that they have, if you look deep enough. You're not putting blinders on to their other motivations, but you're choosing to see past them. Does that make any sense?

      Delete
    4. That makes a ton of sense! And I agree. My motivations can fizzle in the heat of what it takes to turn that into action. So yep, I'd say commitment is a shade apart from simple motivation. Thanks for the brilliant articulation, lady!!! I'm sending this article to a smarty pants friend in California. xo

      Delete
  3. Penis, vagina, touchy-feely? Did I just end up in teen-aged make-out session? (Kidding) Great post, and I think you nailed it. Listen.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You totally did. All week since that Michigan thing I have wanted to say "Vagina." in a stern and serious way for no apparent reason. I should totally have done that here.

      Delete
  4. Excellent essay, Tara. I recall while being an anti-Vietnam War hippie in Tennessee that my fellow progressive activists were ready to dump on Prez. Johnson and the FBI thought-naughts, but when I qualified my support for socialism by saying I'd traveled in Soviet Russia and while its people where normal and nice, the system was indeed "an evil empire" my fellow progressives either ignored me or looked suspiciously at me. Toleramce is indeed a loaded word. But Loving and Listening are key to living a life of joy. Well done!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Tom. I think you nailed it. Nothing is ever that simple, is it? And the problem is that if we want things to actually work, we can't stop thinking when we join a side or we get left with the Vietnam War vs. Living in a Communist USSR as the two proposed alternatives somehow. There are never only two alternatives.

      Delete
  5. I admire you, Tara, because you are so open and willing to listen. I don't think most people (including myself) are. So sure are we of our rightness that it's hard to accept that we might be as bad as the 'other' side, who are just as convicted. I think you've managed to find common ground in differences, when most of us (myself included) would much rather flock with birds of a feather. I will say that you've made me think, and wonder about the things I accept, and those I tolerate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That means a great, great deal coming from you, since you have now seen me get pricklier, whinier and bitchier than anyone else on this blog. I have struggled with this, Kelly. Obviously, I still do. I am a very opinionated woman–more so than most people–and I think that this fact requires me to learn some of these things to function in polite society. When I was younger, I was always sure I was right. Then someone told me I could be right or I could make a difference. I have been thinking about that ever since.

      Delete
  6. I have just been thinking about how horrible I have become at listening. I am not sure how or when it happened, but I just haven't been as open lately. However, I still agree that they have a right to an opinion that I may not agree with. Mostly, because I am not paying attention. I am working hard at correcting this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have a much harder time with this listening thing now in personal arguments than in a larger "things I read on blogs or in newspapers" sense. In the moment of an argument, I get totally stuck in the mud. I can SEE myself being an ass and wish I would back I off, but I am distracted by the sound of blood boiling in my ears. I can be very intolerant, I am sorry to say.

      With regard to "issue" things, I listen most about things I care the most about. I try to go beyond knowing people have a right to their opinion to finding out why they have it. When I can get there, I find there is room for collaboration and understanding. (Unless they are Newt Gingrich, who won't return my calls anyway.)

      Delete
  7. I enjoyed reading your piece. I enjoyed reading your husband essay to the other day. Love and to love it the most important thing. People need to be still and really listen. That is a wonderful message you shared today.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you! It is fascinating to me that this should be our "thing" right now since we are both such bull-headed, opinionated leftie freaks, but I think that is why we feel so strongly about it. I am glad you enjoyed what we had to say.

      In case anyone is interested, here is his post:
      http://reasonable-thought.blogspot.com/2012/06/compassion-controversy-message-for.html

      Delete
  8. This is brilliant, and something I think we could all stand to hear more often--myself very much included. There are people whose opinions/ideas are so offensive to me that it is all too easy to demonize them and block them out entirely. I think so much of what any of us puts out there in the world really is about fear and insecurity--about feeling unloved and ultimately unlovable--the only cure for it is more love.

    ReplyDelete

When you comment, it keeps fairies alive.

Don't forget to choose "subscribe by email" to receive follow-up comments. I almost always reply to comments, and you wouldn't want to miss that. It's all part of saving the fairies.

My Zimbio
Creative Commons License
Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License