Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Empty Barrel
The name-calling really bothers me.
I sit here trying to remember if anyone ever called me a name. It must have happened. I did have a falling out with a colleague once that had him going around town talking about my mental instability. “She’s brilliant but really crazy.” Wisely, I decided to take that as a compliment and use it to my advantage. Who wouldn’t want brilliant with a dose of crazy? It made me the Van Gogh of the local consulting scene.
I don’t remember anyone calling me a name to my face. Well, that’s not true. A couple of guys in high school called me “Buckets.” I didn’t get it for the longest time and then it hit me. You wish, I thought to myself, and stuck my chest out even further. Sweaters.
I still live in the world where there is a lot of membrane and bone between my private thoughts and my public utterances. I will often call someone a motherfucker in my kitchen (not if the motherfucker is actually in my kitchen but say he was at a meeting earlier in the day). But I would never call a motherfucker a motherfucker to his face because it’s trashy behavior not befitting my station and I would be worried he’d take a swing at me or, worse, call me an empty barrel.
So for those reasons, I don’t call people names.
I wasn’t great in Sunday school but I did get the concept of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That phrase along with ‘there but for the grace of God go you or I” comprise the sum total of my religious beliefs. This means that name-calling makes me really uncomfortable. I say that, realizing just now, that last night I basically called the President of the United States a ‘lying sack of shit” on Facebook. But I don’t think he uses Facebook; I’d never call him that on Twitter.
Calling a Congresswoman with a huge history of community service and thousands of constituents an ’empty barrel’ irks me down the road and into next week. That the name-calling came from a Marine Corps General makes it worse. It means that what former President George W. Bush said yesterday about our public discourse being degraded by “casual cruelty” is true. The casual cruelty isn’t confined to coarse, unthinking, obnoxious people who hate their opponents and think nothing of defaming them. The ethos of casual cruelty has seeped into the whole national fabric like a wild red wine stain on a white linen shirt, maybe even a shirt I own.
If my Sunday school lessons still hold (and they have for millennia so why wouldn’t they still be right), then I need to rethink my language and rein in my disgust. I want to hold myself to a higher standard and not be part of the mean girls in the gym coming up with new ways to belittle and humiliate the class dweeb.
I need to remind myself that I hate name-calling. Even when I do it. The empty barrel was full of meaning for me and I’m grateful for that. I’m not going to do what I hate.
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Photo: Alan Diaz/AP
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“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
exactly. I’m not going to do what I hate. I examined my own behavior and it came up lacking. I can’t even feel good about not “being as bad as those people”. Doesn’t matter the remark..I made a negative one and have to own it. So, decision made and no more. Glad you responded to my post. Glad I came over to read your work.