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Clicking Like
I wonder if you understand the effect you can have on someone simply by clicking “Like” or commenting on a post. It is, for me, the equivalent of saying hi when we pass in the hallway. Commenting is like having taken a moment to talk to me.
When I was in high school, I would have floated from class to class if some of my classmates had just said, “Hey, Fred.” 40 years ago, however, we occupied entirely different social classes. I was a Greatest Nothing among The Coconino Nothings. Many of them were the Cool Kids. They were attractive. They were talented. They were athletic. I was none of those things.
Today, that caste system has evaporated. I have friends, now, who simply weren’t allowed even to acknowledge my existence, then. It would have been a violation of etiquette.
If they take a moment to say, “Hey, Fred,” even now, I am delighted. It’s a power they have. I would like to believe I’m someone who has that same power for them. I hope they get a little smile when I click “Like,” or when I comment on something they’ve posted.
It’s a way of saying, at least in a small way, “You matter to me.”
Yes, if you’re reading this, you may be sure you matter to me. Thanks for letting me inside your mind and getting beyond the social norms that would once have separated us. I’m grateful.
Today might be a good day for you to let your friends know that they matter to you. Perhaps you could make a point of clicking “Like” or making a kind comment when you’re on your Social Media today. You might make someone smile. That can be your Good Deed for The Day. And if this post got you to do that, I’ve done mine for the day, too.
Two Moments Video
This is something I’ve never tried before. I wrote a 500 word story. I was inspired by a piece of music while I was writing the story. I decided to put the words of my story to the music that inspired it. I will be interested to learn if this makes sense to anyone else. This is the video of Two Moments.
Saying I Love You
“…you shouldn’t blow the chance
When you’ve got the chance to say
I love you…”
Olivia Newton John
There are 2 people to whom I say I Love You daily. There are 2 others to whom I say it almost daily. There are 3 cats and a dog who hear it from me several times a day. There are 7.68 billion people to whom I never say it at all.
I don’t recall the last time I said it in a romantic sense. It’s almost certainly been a decade. It’s been at least that long since I’ve heard anyone say it to me in that way. I wouldn’t be surprised if I never say it or hear it that way again. Nor would I be unhappy about that. It’s gone badly for me in almost all cases. I can be done with that now.
Why do I say it and hear it so rarely?
Let’s begin with what I believe I Love You means. For me, to love someone means that their happiness is at least as important to you as your own. It means you will, whenever possible, act in ways designed to increase that person’s happiness.
Now, it’s absurd to think I could feel that way about 7.68 billion people. I will never see, let alone meet, well over 99% of them. How can their happiness really be at least as important to me as mine? In any meaningful way, it can’t.
But what can I feel about the rest of the humans who share this planet with me? I would prefer none of them suffered. I would prefer that they all practice and receive Kindness. To a greater or lesser extent, I can empathize with them. Whether it’s an impoverished mother from a tiny tribe in Africa, or the richest woman in a high rise in Manhattan, no mother wants her baby taken away without her consent. I can imagine how that must feel. It’s basic to being human. Their experiences are different from mine, but there are certain aspects of life that we all share. Our hearts all, I suspect, feel joy and pain about many of the same experiences. We are more alike than we are different.
But do I love them?
I don’t think I do in the deepest sense of that word. But I recognize that their happiness is, if not necessarily to me, as important as mine, as yours, as anyone’s, at least to them. I hope others love them too. There’s no reason you, or the person next to you, or someone who has never seen a cell phone deserves less from life than I do. So, while I might not love them, individually, I love their existence.
I find I enjoy being able to say I Love You. It makes me feel good. Perhaps that’s because I can empathize with the person to whom I’m saying it. I like to believe hearing or reading it makes that person happy. It may make me feel good because I can feel the reflection of their happiness. Or, maybe it’s just that I enjoy it in the same way I enjoy pastrami. I don’t get enough of that, either, anymore.
I loved my Father deeply. But, I think I can count on one hand the times, after my childhood, that we said it to each other. We didn’t need to say it; it was always clear to us both. He is gone now; our love continues unabated.
It isn’t necessarily clear, however, to the rest of the planet that I love their existence. Either you or I may be gone tomorrow, too. That makes today the ideal time.
I probably don’t know you. I’ll almost certainly never meet you. And if I do know you, we’re probably not in the habit of saying it to one another. (There are, as you know, only about 4 people out of the 7.68 billion running around, with whom I regularly exchange that phrase.) So, let me say what I can.
I love your existence. It’s at least as important to me as my own. I do my best to act in ways designed to increase your happiness. And, if you are nothing more than your existence, as some would posit, then I suppose it would be fair for me to say, in a very general way:
I Love You.
The Spiral of Poverty
“I’ve seen the bottom, and I’ve been on top, but mostly I’ve lived in between…”
Dan Fogelberg
It’s easy to blame the victims of poverty for their state. They’re lazy. They don’t manage money well enough. They should get a better job. Those things can be true. Some of them are true of my poverty.
Sometimes it’s something else.
They get laid off. They retire. They change jobs. They have massive bills they hadn’t anticipated. Their health declines. Any of these can cause poverty. And they are, by no means, the only causes. The causes are as numerous and varied as its victims.
My own poverty is nowhere near as bad as that of most others. I have been fortunate in that I have never had to go without a home. I have never gone without food. I have always managed (even if only barely) to keep myself in the insulin I need in order to survive.
But since I can speak only for myself, I will use my own experiences to explain the spiraling effects of poverty.
I quit teaching in 2016 because I couldn’t do it anymore. I had begun to hate myself because I thought that teaching students that reading is boring was immoral. And thus began my self contempt.
Students whose eyes had once lit up with joy to start the next Sherlock Holmes story, to hear more of Shakespeare, to see if Rainsford could escape from General Zaroff, to see if Santiago could get his marlin back to shore, became students whose eyes glazed over with torpor when we had to do “Close Readings” of empty and soulless works. They soon discovered the only reason to read is to pass a mindless test on a computer.
I fought against it. My principal gave me horrible evaluations because I wasn’t a “team player.” I wasn’t tracking data. I wasn’t updating the My Learning Plan website with “artifacts” to prove that I’m good. I was too busy trying to sneak in something to spark their imaginations. By my final year, all literature had all been banned from my classroom.
Near the end of my career, I was borrowing money from places with neon signs just to make rent. I was working two jobs, and I had even found some roommates in order to reduce my expenses, but it just wasn’t possible to keep up. Why? Teachers make good money, don’t they? Uh… no. And that actually was the beginning of my spiraling poverty.
In 2005, my second marriage, in Maine, where they pay teachers well, fell apart. My father was getting old, and I knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer. I came back to Arizona to be with him while I could. And I took a cut of roughly $12,000 a year to do that.
Was that the right decision? I believe it was. You can, however, tell me that my poverty was, then, my fault. I should have stayed in Maine where they paid me a better wage. You may be right.
When I quit in 2016, I pulled the only retirement I had left, (I lost half of it in each of my two divorces) paid off the neon sign places, and I lived, briefly, the life I had always wanted to live. I went several times to California to meet one of my heroes and see him perform. I took Mom there a couple of times. I wrote a screenplay. I made videos. I slept. My depression was kept at bay, and I looked forward to each new day. My contempt for myself, now that I wasn’t doing anything I considered to be immoral, was lessening.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Fred. You should have saved that money.” That may be true. On the other hand, though I live in poverty now, I have memories of beautiful experiences I wasn’t going to have any other way. No one can take that joy away from me.
But once you’re in poverty it spirals.
You get sick and miss work, so your paycheck is short. You have to make choices about what to skip paying. If it’s your car payment, you save some money this month, but next month, you need to find twice as much, and, of course, you have to pay the penalties. Next month, your problem is twice as bad. Your budget fits one car payment, not two. So then they repossess your car.
You don’t want to lose it again, so now you have to buy the cheapest functional car you can. And you have to get it to pass emissions, which, because the car is so old, you can do only if you know a guy who knows a guy who can get the check engine light off long enough to get the guy he knows at Emissions Testing to look the other way. What is normally a $17 bill goes to $117. It’s the price of poverty.
It spirals.
And now you begin to think of yourself as being worthless. You are beneath contempt because all too often you’re begging for help. You beg from friends, from the government, from charities, and from churches. And you hate yourself for that. It’s not what a person, particularly a man in our society, is supposed to do. And your friends are kind, and the government can be helpful if you can jump through all the right hoops, and charities and churches can be nice, too. But, inside, you feel as though what you are doing is no way to live. You spent your life giving. Now you spend it taking. And that’s contemptible.
As I said, it spirals.
So, when you see someone in poverty, you don’t need to give them your sympathy or your money. But you also should try to avoid giving them your contempt. Trust me, they have plenty of that for themselves. And it’s not what any of them want.
Cruelty
Several weeks ago, I wrote about Kindness, which is, to me, the most valuable human attribute. I believe in its power to help, and to make the world a better place in which to live.
Today, I’m concerning myself with its opposite: Cruelty.
Cruelty has become fashionable. I don’t understand why.
Earlier this week I saw a post on a News Page that talked about Anti Trump protesters being splashed, twice, with snow, water, and ice by a man driving by them, at high speeds, down a street with a snow plow attached to the front of his truck. The street was in no need of plowing. It was perfectly navigable, but there was still snow and ice on its edges. This was not a city worker. He was a private citizen. He did this intentionally because he disapproved of the protesters.
These were Anti Trump protesters, but, to be clear, he would have been equally wrong if the people, who were all in excess of 60 years old, had been Trump supporters. This isn’t about politics.
I read through the comments on the article. People were congratulating him. They were laughing about people they don’t like being hurt.
I posted that I found that horrible. 15 some odd people liked my comment. Quite a number of others, though, told me I was wrong.
Some of the comments included the following:
- Fred Eder how were they hurt? Maybe wet but hurt. I forgot their precious feelings.
- Ha!
Feelings do count to liberals.
Boo-Hoo - liberal BS!!
- He was covering unsightly garbage with fresh clean snow. Should get an award for making his city more beautiful.
- Love it. Good for the plow driver
For me, those comments are cruel. They do nothing to help anyone. They are taking delight in the misfortune of others.
There are, in fact, kind Conservatives in the world. They can be intelligent, decent people, just as Liberals can. And there are mean and cruel Liberals in the world. They can be foolish, horrible people, just as Conservatives can.
My concern is that we take delight in bad things happening to those we don’t like. We refer to one another with epithets such as “Snowflake,” or “Libtard,” or “RepuliKKKans,” as though this somehow proves a point.
There is no need to agree with one another on every topic. In fact, it’s unnecessary to agree with each other on nearly anything. One of the women I most admire in the world disagrees with me about everything from politics to the afterlife. But I admire and love her because she is Kind. She is respectful in her disagreement. She cares about my well-being as I care about hers. We encourage one another in our enterprises.
Cruelty isn’t an ideology. It’s a form of immaturity, and it hurts others. It makes the conversations that we need to have in order to solve our problems all but impossible.
I contend that feelings are part of the human experience. They are the reason we bother to exist at all. Without them, nothing has any meaning.
Sometimes feelings will get hurt. That’s a part of life. When I ask a woman out, and she says no, my feelings are likely to be hurt. That’s inevitable. And she doesn’t owe it to me to go out with me because my feelings will be hurt if she doesn’t. All she owes me is a polite no. And there’s not a thing wrong with her for saying no. I’ve come to expect it so much that I never bother to ask anyone out anymore. It’s no fun to be turned down, and it might make her feel uncomfortable. She’s not cruel. She’s just not attracted to me.
But to go out of one’s way to hurt feelings is cruel. No one is helped by it.
I understand if you’re not concerned with helping others. You don’t owe that, I suppose, to anyone. But that doesn’t mean you need to make the lives of others worse.
If you can’t be Kind, you can at least refrain from Cruelty. Join me in that. Please.
Kindness
Kindness
What I find I value most in people is kindness. It’s not just kindness toward me. I’m grateful for that, but, as the vast majority of the world doesn’t know me, I can’t really spend too much time expecting them to be kind to me. It’s when I see people behave kindly toward others that my faith in humanity is restored.
Sometimes, it’s giving the guy outside Circle K a couple of dollars, without making some value judgment about how he’ll spend it. Sometimes a millionaire makes a donation to a school or a hospital. Sometimes it’s the words someone says.
For me, this is where I find the true measure of one’s humanity. It’s not a matter of your achievements. It’s not a question of your wealth. It’s not even in your relationships. It’s about whether you can think of another person as being as important as you are.
If you can do what Atticus suggested, and you can climb inside someone’s skin and walk around in it for a while, and then, move to the next step, your humanity begins to glow. You ask yourself the vital question: What would I need if that were me?
You might not have the money to solve their problems. But you might have a dollar. You might not know the words to say, but you might have a smile. If nothing else, you can look at someone and let them know you see them; they exist. There are times when that simple knowledge can make all the difference.
Because I value kindness, I try my best to show it. I have no money to give anyone, as I have none for myself. But, I can write something for someone who needs help getting the words just right. And I do that. I can remind someone why they matter, even when they don’t want to hear it. And I do that. I can smile because I can summon music I’ve heard and stored in my soul, and I can use it to put a smile on my face, even when I don’t feel external joy. And I do that,too.
I’ve come to believe that my productive days are in the past. I made a difference for 3 decades. I’m proud of that. But, now my health is shot, and the difference I can make is not nearly so great. A friend pointed out that my Defensive Driving courses might still make some difference, and I like to believe she’s right. But I will never have the effect in 5 hours in a room with 30 adults that I had in 7 hours a day, five days a week, nine months of the year with children who wanted to learn.
What I have left to give, then, is Kindness. I don’t believe this makes me soft. It makes me useful. I no longer am a Tree with branches in which a friend can play, rich with leaves that offer shade to shield someone from the sun’s harsh rays. I have no apples left to give. I am naught but an old stump. But Shel Silverstein would tell you that even a stump can be Useful.
If you would like somewhere to sit, there’s room. Come and be for a spell.
Fred's Thoughts 