Say Something Nice

How to reduce tension, get along now and in the future, exude the tasty fruit of kindness...

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/30/greene-if-you-can%E2%80%99t-or-can-say-anything-nice/

Eventually (maybe!) this election cycle will end. And we will have (maybe!) results, which will take, at minimum, months to play out in any tangible every-day-life ways.

Our rhetoric and our conversations now are necessarily different from what they will be after next Tuesday, given the urgency some feel yet to make a persuasive difference in the voting process. Still, what we say now has consequences for relationships and reality now and into the future.

Is it possible to be passionate, driven, righteous, wise, even angry, and at the same time able to see and speak of goodness in neighbors with whom we disagree?

Group hug-it-out in five days!

{semi-cross-posted on Fake-I-Mean-Facebook}

Assurance

During college, I remember reading that Jim Elliot didn't do insurance: he believed it was like gambling. At the time, I sort of cared what Jim Elliot and his widow Elizabeth purportedly believed.

These days, especially as I'm wrestling with a balance between hope and healthy skepticism, I find myself revisiting the Jim Elliot position. Is the wise and responsible thing to carry as much insurance as possible, because we prepare for the worst? Or, to put that money elsewhere becuase we hope for the best?

When I moved to Lynn last summer I was floored to find that my car insurance went up by nearly 100%. (I'd paid $1100 the year before and got a bill for $2000 in Lynn.) Drivers in my new urban hometown are, statistically, just that bad, I guess. I got on the phone to alert my insurance company of what must surely be a mistake, discovered it apparently was not, but reduced my coverage in a few areas to get it down to $1400. Over the course of this last year I've carried this weight around with me. For some arbitrary reason, this was an unacceptable amount for me to pay for car insurance.

I vowed I would not pay another annual bill over $1000. Now, you should know that Massachusetts has no Geicko. Insurance rates are mandated and non-competitive. Everybody offers the exact same thing. It's all determined by where you live, what you drive, and how you drive. Still, it drove me absolutely crazy that my good friend with self-admittedly tarnished driving record (sometimes an accident a year) in the town next door was paying less than me.

So, this morning I talked to my carrier again, and got my bill down to $1000. I am now carrying the bare legal minimums in every category, and have canceled comprehensive on my own aging car. (I figured out I was double covering my own personal human body between car and health insurance, too.)

In the shower after I got off the phone with the insurance agent - who didn't even try to talk me into keeping higher coverage, I started to panic a little bit. What if I hit someone and maxed out my insurance coverage? What if I drove into a 7-11 store? And, I remembered that nothing inside the walls of my condo is insured, either. What if it's all destroyed by fire and rain?

Driving in to school I was super-concentrating. Please note that I'm an excellent driver (my dad lets me drive slow in the driveway), and have only one accident on my insurance record ever in the history of the world, and it was minor, and it was raining. But, it was raining on the way in to work this morning. What have I done?! Did I do the unwise thing, banking (literally) on the hope that all will be well?

When I pulled into my spot behind my building this morning, I bumped into the brick wall before I put the car in park.

Secrets breed lies

Defenses are offered for the ethicality of anonymity - an otherwise abhorrent form of "communication" which denies a most essential piece of communication, in my and many others' perspectives, that of human connection. One such defense is that certain concepts are worth expressing but social reality makes it unsafe for the expresser to own the expression, to be a human being with a name.

A name is one of the most powerful elements of God's creation.

Concepts worth expressing - for the sake of the individual, because to get it out is better than to bottle it up inside; and for the sake of the larger society, because to be made aware of the anonymous "person"'s reality expands everyone's experience of true reality.

Unsafe - because of physical, emotional, and other retributions that individuals or masses might enact upon hearing the expressed perspective. Enact on the expresser and others.

The defense of anonymity as a rule (especially in mass or large group communication - newspapers, bulletin boards, other print publications) is based on the assumption of the worst. It is a cynical assumption. Or, maybe it is not. Maybe it is a responsible, discerning and wise assumption.

But, certainly, it doesn't allow me, as an individual human being, to make a choice in responding (to a human being). And it doesn't allow me to connect with another individual human being directly. (It may, though, spur on my connection with someone else through conversation and processing the anonymous post. I have to call it a post. I can't bring myself to call it a communication.)

Question:

What is the right (best, loving, truthful) thing to do when I know who the anonymous is, and the anonymous does not (apparently) know that I know?

Anonymous' secret, arguably rightly motivated, places me in a position of keeping a secret without sharing a secret. It, in effect, requires me to lie.

Does the anonymous want to know that I know, if I know that I am a safe recipient of this expression? That I, as a member of a mass, untrusted audience, can, in fact be trusted?

Do I lie (by omission) by acting and communicating as if the anonymity is intact?

What are the good effects that can come from telling this particular truth (the truth that the secret is not a secret)? How can I love more fully, by naming? Can I love the anonymous by offering a safe relationship? Does the anonymous want to be free to own their expression? To be known?

What are the good effects that come from not telling this particular truth? (We cannot tell all truths all the time. There is no such thing as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. All truth that is told is chosen, contextualized, in its moment of telling. That doesn't make it less true, just not the whole truth. It is true right now that I am thirsty. But, it is irrelevant, and unhelpful. No less true.)

I want to be able to relate to named human beings individually, openly, relevantly, and lovingly. When I keep secrets (when I sense that it would be safe not to do so), I feel like I am lying.

Full disclosure: to be fair and honest, I admit that I hold my own secrets. There are truths I do not tell to many people because I don't feel safe having those individuals know. The worst part is when these truths are relevant, they should be owned. But, I am not expressing them anonymously, and when I share them with a human friend, I try to trust the friend to make the most wise decision on whether and where to keep or share my secret. Confidentiality itself, as a general rule, has many of the same pros and cons as anonymity, including its essential cynical nature. Maybe?