Adventures in Civility

Grace & Buckwheat

When we brought Grace home, she was an 11 pound ball of fluff. Upon entry into the house, she caught sight of our 23 pound Maine Coon cat Buckwheat and she was enchanted. She ran after him as fast as she could, but as she was too small to manage the stairs, Buckwheat retreated to the master bathroom and Grace’s short attention span quickly turned to her new surroundings. Over the next few days, Buckwheat expressed his displeasure with Grace’s arrival. He hissed at her and swatted at her a couple of times. I heard noises from him that I had not heard before. I think the enormous pile of shit on the floor was a sign that he was not happy with our choice of siblings for him. He had been an only child for several years and was very attached to us and accustomed to his routine.

Grace grew so fast and within two weeks, she could climb the stairs so Buckwheat was left without his safety zone. He was quick to show her who was boss and while she desperately wanted to be his friend, she showed him respect. He had first dibs on her food even though he didn’t really want to eat it. If he decided to take a little nap on the stairs, she would not walk by him. She would just squeal until we were able to escort her past him.

Over the first few months, I feared we had made a mistake in adding a new member to the family. Buckwheat seemed a little grouchier and he wasn’t getting all of the attention he used to get. Grace required so much care.

In time, however, the two of them really learned to tolerate each other and eventually, it was more than just tolerance. They really just liked to be together. Buckwheat always wanted to be in the same room as Grace and Grace just loved Buckwheat. Soon they were actually playing together and doing sweet things like licking each other’s ears. Sometimes the play seems a little rough, but no one ever gets hurt.

I love that our “kids” can behave civilly towards each other, but it did take some time and every once in a while, Grace gets too excited and Buckwheat has to put her in her place. It’s interesting though to watch the two of them work things out and come to a place of acceptance.

Driving - Part I

I was driving home from a long day of work and the traffic was at a torturous crawl. I was waiting at a stoplight for what seemed like 13.7 minutes and finally the light turned green. Unfortunately, the lane I was in was blocked by a large truck. He had mistakenly thought that my westbound lane was an additional eastbound lane and by the time he had realized his error, the cars around him had edged him out and he couldn’t get his truck back in the correct lane. Cars around me honked and honked. I felt myself getting hot. “Dumbass,” I thought. When I finally was able to drive by him, my plan was to give him the finger, but somehow, in a moment of grace, I looked at his face. He was clearly embarrassed that he had made such a stupid mistake and there was absolutely nothing he could do. Obviously, I didn’t end up giving him the finger. I just drove by and went home, my commute hardly affected. I, however, was affected and felt empathy for this poor guy. I thought about how ashamed I would have felt if I had done the same thing and how sad I would have felt with people honking at me and flipping me off.

I’m no saint (believe me!), but I’d like to be better about trying to remember that moment and what the other guy must be thinking.

Driving - Part II

Bill and I had stayed the night at a hotel at the Domain and the next morning, we were well rested and in a great mood. We worked out at the gym and then packed up all of our things to go home, got in the car and drove through the maze that is the Domain to get to the freeway. We stopped at a four way stop and turned right. I was on my phone or something and wasn’t paying attention, but soon after we made the turn, a guy pulled up next to us in a Nissan, rolled down his window and motioned for us to roll down our window. Curious, I rolled it down and with a smile on his face, he asked, “do you know how a four way stop works?” I was confused and don’t even remember answering so he continued, “I guess not because you just rolled right through one you asshole!” And then, “just because you drive a Mercedes doesn’t mean you can….” And that’s when I just did it. Without thinking, I just gave him the one finger salute and Bill yelled “f--- you!” The guy drove off and we were left boiling mad. That’s all it took was some guy to insult us and we were furious, our good mood ruined.

And for what? Of course we didn’t stay in a bad mood all day and spent the next hour or so thinking up better responses. Like what if we just pretended not to speak English and just smiled, pointed and waved at him? But what if we’d been really mad and had a gun or something? I mean that stuff does happen. I wish we hadn’t spent any time even being bothered by his actions, but we felt slighted and attacked and that was our automatic response.

We don’t know why the guy was thinking like he did. Maybe he was on his way to a double shift at a job he hates or maybe his girlfriend just broke up with him for a guy that drives a Mercedes. Maybe he needed someone to hurt just like he did so he didn’t feel so alone.

Work

When I started working at my current job, it was not under the easiest of circumstances. The woman I was trying to replace had passed away and had done the job since 1978. Her shoes were impossible to fill. I had no manual to follow and had to depend on everyone for help. Add to that the fact that everyone else was swamped with their own work and I had been hired without unanimous consent and you can understand why it was a little uncomfortable. One of the women that I depended on for help was one tough cookie. She could be a bit aggressive and I was a bit passive (OK truthfully I can be a weenie, I hate confrontation). She was always super busy and didn’t have any spare time to help me, but she did. We were not alike in any way that I could see. She was direct and told people like it was. I wanted to please everyone. Don’t get me wrong, she was friendly enough. She just didn’t put up with any shit. Honestly, she scared me a bit for a long time. Plus, we were on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum and didn’t have much in common.

It took a few months, but I got the job down pretty well and started to fit in and now after two years, the place is like home (well OK my home is a little more relaxing…or a lot more relaxing) and the people almost like family. And the woman that scared me for such a long time? She is absolutely dear to me now - - a confidant and one of my strongest supporters. I may not agree with her politically, but I don’t really care. I like who she is and know she would be there for me if I needed her and vice-versa. Had I just written her off in the beginning assuming we could never like each other, I could have missed out on a new friend and that would have been a shame. We just never know what can happen if we just keep an open mind.

Comment Sections

After I separated from my ex-husband in 2011, I met someone. Someone special. It wasn’t planned. I wasn’t looking. It just happened. I guess it wasn’t ideal timing. I “should” have gotten divorced first, lived as an independent woman a la Mary Tyler Moore, started online dating or something and then after an appropriate amount of time (divide the number of years you were married by your age and then add in your weight in kilograms multiplied by pi and divide by the cosine of the hypotenuse….or something like that), met someone. But that didn’t happen and thank goodness. Online dating scares the hell out of me.

The problem with meeting someone when you are officially still married is that you can feel extraordinarily guilty. Or maybe some people do not, but I definitely did. I didn’t want to hurt my ex-husband and I hadn’t “dated” since I was 20. What in the hell was I doing?

 But I was head over heels and very, very happy and sometimes in life, things may not look “right” to some people and that’s OK. You just have to do what works for you and hope you don’t hurt people along the way.

But I still felt guilty. A lot. And one day I was reading one of those online celebrity magazines and there was an article about an actress who had recently divorced her husband and they had kids and she was dating someone new and there were rumors they had met before she was divorced. Maybe they had an affair? I don’t remember the details. This particular online magazine used to have a comments section for every article and I would often see what the masses had to say and I didn’t usually get very bothered about it, but the comments section on this particular article was just venomous. People were calling her horrible names and they were so angry that she was seeing someone so soon after her divorce and that she may have been cheating on her now ex-husband and she should be ashamed of herself and that’s what all of those “liberals” in Hollywood do. They just all live like Sodom and Gomorrah or something. I’m sure this woman didn’t read any of this stuff or at least I hope she didn’t. It wasn’t really about her, it was about the people writing it, but I was making it about me and I got so upset. I could just feel people hating me and thinking those things of me - - that I was a whore for dating before I was officially divorced. Those people writing that stuff don’t know me from Adam and they didn’t know that I couldn’t sleep that night because I could feel their hatred. They had an opinion and they had a platform to express that opinion and they didn’t know they were hurting anyone. Thankfully, that online magazine no longer offers a comments section on their site. I think that’s probably a healthy thing.

Politics

My husband, Bill, wrote an article and it got picked up in a newspaper in Dallas and this was just after the Parkland shooting in Florida. The point that he was making in the article was that often when these events occur, the consensus seems to be that the perpetrator was just some sort of crazy maniac. The powers that be just chalk it up to insanity and refuse to look at any alternative theories. The truth of the matter, Bill said, is that not all insane people are violent and not all violent people are insane. The numbers speak for themselves. Yes, some of these mass murderers are insane, but not all of them and we are stigmatizing an entire population of people with mental disorders when we say they must all have violent tendencies. There are other factors involved in these acts of violence and we need to look at those too.

Bill got some good feedback on his article. For the most part. There was one email in particular that really upset him. It was from a man who called Bill a “typical academic liberal” trying to take away his guns and that he didn’t know anything about the real world and all colleges do is teach people to be idiot liberals.

Now I am all for people expressing their personal views (even if it makes me uncomfortable), but it was like this guy didn’t even read the article. He wasn’t willing to hear anything that Bill had to say. All he was saying was that there are multiple factors associated with these mass shootings and by simply saying that the person was “crazy,” we aren’t ever going to solve the problem. We will just feel a little bit safer in the moment because if that person was just crazy, then that’s an isolated incident and it happened because of him. It’s not going to happen to me because I don’t hang around crazy people. I stay away from them because they are violent and dangerous right?

But these are not isolated incidents. They are happening all too frequently and we need to start being civil to one another to the point where we can hear what other people are saying and not just assume that our ideas are the only ideas.

The solution to our problem here is not to focus on one part of all of this, but to be open to hearing ideas about all of it. There are problems with the education system, problems with bullying, problems with the criminal justice system, problems with effective mental health treatment, problems with the healthcare system, and yes, there are problems with gun control.

Thoughts

So what do we do now? I heard the author Brené Brown give a talk once and she said that it starts with all of us. We can’t legislate our way into being more civil. She said that if we are going to be outraged and offended by the mean things people are saying about Malia and Sasha Obama, then we need to be equally outraged and offended by the mean things people are saying about Ivanka and Barron Trump. We can’t pick and choose. We need to be willing to trade shoes with everyone and actually hear what they are saying. I need to be able to say, “this is what I believe, but I can see why you believe the way you do and I can appreciate that and I don’t believe you are wrong or a bad person.” And that is not easy. It can feel like someone is attacking your values and who you are as a person when they don’t believe like you do. I get that. It is hard. But don’t we do things that are hard every day? Life is hard sometimes. But I think we can make it so much better. That is my challenge to myself - - to try and be open to hearing the other side and practicing civility.