Every now and then, when you sit down to eat, the telephone rings with some beggar on the other end of the phone. You listen patiently while your food grows cold. You listen patiently while some clown tries to sell you something you really don’t want. And that person - that clown - will become angry with you if you get a little short with them. It’s almost as if there was some expectation on their part that they could interrupt your day with impunity, and rob you of your supper hour tranquility anytime they wanted. Of course, you are expected to sit back and take it. I mean, excuse me, but where do they get off? Who are they?
Oh, they’ll tell you that they’re just trying to make a living. I have nothing against that. I wish them well. Hey, knock yourself out, friend. But don’t call me and destroy the peace of my home so you can go to the bank and cash your paycheck on Friday. I mean, get real.
You don’t see me doing that. I once had a job where I worked until 3:30 a.m.. I got home shortly before four o’clock in the morning, and if my memory serves me correctly, I never called anybody up and told them that I just got home from work or that I was out all night making a living. I never called to tell them that I thought they just might want to know that I had a rough night at work. Had I done that, they would have called police. The police would have arrested me for 1) telephone harassment, and 2) for waking them up during their quiet time (never disturb a fat cop at donut time).
But the beggars can get on the horn and call me up anytime they want. They can disturb my peace. They can rob me of the peaceful sanctity of my home so they can make a living. Big Whoop Dee Dee.
Or maybe those beggars will tell you that they are trying to raise funds for a very worthy cause. Oh well, that’s different. Jeeze, why didn’t I think of that? They’ll tell you that they’re soliciting funds for, say, breast cancer research. What could be more noble than that? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps if I hired six or seven of the teenagers in my neighborhood and had them call you every hour on the hour throughout the night to talk to you about breast cancer research you might get the idea that, the nobility of that grand thought aside, there’s something really obnoxious about being disturbed over and over again - even if it’s for a really good cause.
Oh, and how about those teens? Every September, two or three young girls show up on my front steps, dressed in marching band uniforms, collecting funds for the school band. Each year these beggars ask me for money so they can play in the band. And of course, I am a gigantic curmudgeon if I do not give them money so they can play in the band. But consider this if you will: when my daughter was learning to drive an automobile, did I walk around the neighborhood and collect funds so she could buy a car? No, I did not. Even the thought of doing that would have seemed absurd, not only to me, but to my neighbors as well. “Buy your daughter a car? Buy your daughter a car? Hah. You gotta be kidding. Hit the bricks, pal!”
So here’s my notion of how the world should work: if you want to play the clarinet in the high school marching band, then ask your mom to buy you a clarinet. If you need a uniform to be in that marching band, then ask your dad to buy you a uniform. Why are you asking me to spend my money for something I’m not even interested in? I cannot play an instrument. I am not interested in marching around on a soggy football field. You are the person who is interested in being in that marching band. Why are you on my front porch beating on my door asking me for money? Get your wallet out. Spend your money or your mom’s money or your dad’s money. But don’t come around disturbing me to beg money from me for something I don’t give a hoot about. Get a job and then take part of your earnings to pay for that musical instrument and that band uniform.
Okay. Okay. Put me down as one of those mean and rude persons who just doesn’t care about the rest of the world. Put me down as someone so wrapped up in himself that he can’t support these worthy causes. After all, who am I to stand in your way when you’re just trying to earn a living? Who am I to stand in your way when you’re just the 15th or the 16th person who’s been banging at my door today to collect money for some worthy cause? Who am I to get upset because my mailbox is stuffed to the gizzards every day with junk mail soliciting funds for causes that I’m not interested in? Hey, it’s all for a worthy cause. Why am I being such a heartless jackass?
Well, maybe it’s the principle of the thing. When we give that cancer envelope to a high school kid and send her around the neighborhood to solicit funds, we are not teaching her how to be compassionate, or caring, or how to be of service to her fellow human beings. We are teaching her how to be a beggar. We’re not teaching her some noble enterprise that she will be able to use for the rest of her life. We’re teaching her to become an obnoxious and hated person merely to satisfy our own personal idea of what is useful or valuable. We’re all for breast cancer research, so we enlist the youngster in our cause and send her out into the world to beat on doors even when doing so disturbs the peace of our neighbors.
Did it ever occur to you that the person down the street might not be particularly interested in breast cancer research? If you are so turned on by that breast cancer research, then get your wallet out and send the cancer researchers a couple of bucks yourself. Don’t beat on my door. And don’t make that high school kid traipse all over the neighborhood working on your agenda.
See, you got me started.
Oh, here’s a related issue. Some years ago a business associate gave me a one-year gift subscription to an environmental magazine. The magazine was beautifully printed with gorgeous pictures inside: Yellowstone Park, mountain streams, desert cacti, and so forth. It was lovely. I would look at this magazine when it came in the mail. But I was always somewhat taken aback by the magazine. It was not that I was anti-environmental person. Rather, it was because the magazine dealt with a topic that was not my personal cause celebre, much in the same way that a model railroading magazine might not appeal to someone who had no interest in model railroading. If NASCAR, to take another example, was not part of your world, then a NASCAR magazine would seem pretty inappropriate as a gift, would it not? Well, that’s what I thought of that environmental magazine: it was nice, but environmentalism was not my bag.
At the end of the year, a woman called me on the telephone to renew the subscription to that magazine. I told her that I wasn’t interested. She asked, “Aren’t you interested in the environment?” I told her that a misguided business associate had given me a gift subscription to the magazine, but it was a magazine that I wasn’t particularly interested in. Immediately she asked if I wasn’t interested in clean air. I thought that was a very curious question because who could answer that they weren’t interested in clean air? It’s almost like asking someone if they would rather be hacked to death with a machete or live to be one hundred years old. It was a loaded question. I told her I wasn’t interested in the magazine, and that I had made no statement whatever about clean air.
Well, right away she decided she was going to be one of those I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer kind of persons. She wanted to argue. She wanted to couch all of her arguments in terms of environmentalism, when I was commenting on the merits of the magazine, per se, to me as a reader. She kept going back to the clean air, pristine environment attractions shown in the magazine. I told her that was all fine and dandy. But I wasn’t interested in paying to look at pictures of clean air and pristine environments. “I can look out my back door to see that,” I told her. “Why should I pay for it?”
Oh, but she was feisty and would not let go. She kept hammering away at her basic environmental argument until I asked her if she was compensated for her telephone solicitation work. She asked what I meant by that. I said, “Do they pay you for what you’re doing right now, or do you do this as a volunteer?” She said, “I am a volunteer.” I said, “Then you are talking from a position of privilege. Someone, somewhere else is paying your freight. Someone is paying your bills and buying your groceries, because you’re sitting here on the telephone talking about environmentalism, and you don’t have to go out and get a real job to support yourself. That’s gotta be nice.” Suddenly the telephone went silent.
Isn’t that the basic problem with speaking from a position of privilege? As long as you can walk over and flip that switch on the wall to turn your lights on, you never really have to worry about the nuts and bolts of generating electrical power. So you can stand there and tell people (with cheeky impunity) that we should have renewable electric generation - wind turbines, solar panels, whatever - instead of those nasty old coal-burning plants down by the river. The fact that we cannot generate enough renewable electricity to meet our current electrical needs is beside the point. If you speak from a position of privilege, you can say anything you want - even if it doesn’t make any sense. And you can send that little girl around the neighborhood with a petition for your neighbors to sign because it’s a Good and Noble and Worthy Cause.
Please. Do not knock on my door and disturb my supper. Do not ask me to contribute to your marching band clarinet/uniform fund raiser. Shovel some sidewalks. Mow some lawns. Get a job at Burger King and use your own money to buy those things. Tell your mom to get a job so she doesn’t spend all of her time thinking up Stupid Things For You To Do, or Noble Causes For You To Espouse. And don’t call me on the telephone. I’m not interested.
It would be very easy to sit here at this particular point in time and pretend that you are dealing only with a narcissistic person. In fact, there is nothing narcissistic at all about not wanting to be interrupted at dinnertime. And I say this because if it were possible for you to be interrupted with impunity all the time, then I think you’d end up with the kind of a situation where you’d be unable to do anything on your own because some interloper would be there beating on your door and insisting that you do things on his clock and at his pace and at his time. But since when is the world structured in such a way that you are fair game for every kook that walks by and knocks on your door, or for every interloper who calls at supper time to sell you something you don’t want? Really, why would you be a narcissist merely because you wish to take a nap after lunch and have a small problem with clowns calling you up and trying to get you to buy something you really don’t want? Excuse me, but let me ask the question again, who the hell are they?
I sympathize with the woman who took her Cub Scout son around the neighborhood trying to sell some trash to people they didn’t want so the kid could go to Camp Shaganappi or whatever. I’m sure she was a well-meaning person. I’m sure that she wanted to teach her son some lessons in dealing with people who lived in the neighborhood. Perhaps she wanted to teach the boy how to sell things. Perhaps she wanted to teach him how to interact with others. Fine. But notice that this woman did not ask permission to do that. Notice that she did not ask others if they minded being part of her little training exercise for her son. Instead, the silly woman got angry, because these people - the self-serving, rotten, narcissistic miscreants - became a little miffed when she came knocking at their doors. They said rude things and maybe they got a little snotty with Mrs. Den Mother. But let me go back to my original point again: who the hell does she think she is?
Each of us holds certain opinions. Each of us finds his own opinions to be sacred and wonderful. Each of us, if we lived in a perfect world, would attempt to impose our opinion on others. Each of us would get quite upset when the rest of the world proved to be unreceptive to the merits of our opinions.
I’’m living here the edge of the world and every day some half-demented woman calls me up and wants me to support her pet project. She asks me if I would like to contribute to, say, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and then she’s suddenly disappointed when I tell her no. But she doesn’t take no for an answer, however. She wants to know why I refuse to contribute. I tell her it’s none of her business why I refuse to contribute. But she browbeats me until I tell her that I don’t like the basic idea of women running around restricting my personal freedom because some drunk driver - somewhere else - ran over a child and killed him. It’s unfortunate that the drunk driver killed the child. It’s unfortunate that the parents of the slain child have to bear the heartbreak and sorrow of that death. On those days when I feel especially persnickety, I tell the woman that I’m for drunk driving; not against it. Of course, she always expresses shock at my wholly troglodyte, knuckle-dragging attitude that I seem to have about drinking and driving. “How can you possibly say that?” she asks.
Again, to return to the central point here: Your attitudes and your opinions are, in fact, your attitudes and your opinions. They are not my attitudes and they are not my opinions. Why, to ask a specific question, should you become angry with me because you have failed to convince me of the logic and power of your arguments? Why am I considered rude because I don’t buy your silly arguments? Why am I a troglodyte because I fail to buy into your fascist arguments?
Fascist? Oh, yes. The rationale for a group like Mothers Against Drunk Driving is essentially a fascist approach to controlling the behavior of others. They never seem to be content to punish the particular person who killed a child after drinking and driving. Instead, they want to inconvenience all drivers everywhere at every time who decide to have a little drink once in a while before they drive home.
I sympathize with the poor parents of the dead child. I feel bad for them. But my feeling bad for them will not bring that dead child back to life. And restricting the behavior of everybody else because a few people drink and drive irresponsibly will do nothing for the dead child or his grieving parents. When you thrust your totalitarian plan on me, don’t get upset because I seem to be rude and uncaring. Call me rude all you want. You’re the one shoveling your trash down my throat, pal. You’re the one restricting my behavior. You’re the one imposing your agenda on my freedom. Again, let me ask, “Who the hell are you?”
So, go out and get a job. Stop trying to micromanage the world. And leave me alone. Okay? I’m trying to take a nap.
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