Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Anger Management
I was awake last night stewing about a conversation I had with someone a year ago.
It was, as I told a friend earlier in the day, one of the few times in my long life that someone tried to bully me. Of course, it was about homelessness. About how showing homeless people too much kindness just makes them want to stick with their homelessness, sleep outside on the ground, you know, because the kindness makes the dirt and the wet and the dark so incredibly comfortable.
It must have had a big impact on me, that sensation of someone trying to back me into a corner, because I haven’t forgotten it at all. It’s visceral. Like a little worm in the gut. The worm woke up last night and said hello.
And, so, I wanted revenge.
Years ago, when I worked in a very rough and tumble community action agency, I was taught that “living well is the best revenge.” I was also taught “what goes around comes around,” but sometimes you have to wait a good long time.
I’m grateful for my early training because it convinced me to erase the email I wrote minutes after waking. “Is this useful?” I asked myself. No. It is self-indulgent.
You simply need to stay the course, support what you believe with your whole heart, and wait. The good work speaks for itself. The bullying will swallow its own echo.
I am old. I know how to wait.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Yes, we have waited in many real and virtual lines for a long cumulative time. Boy, that makes me angry and I want to shoot off an e-mail to someone, somewhere. Oh, wait. You just told me…