Last night, my sister read me a hate filled post from someone I don’t know, and have no desire to know. In this post, the person basically said that all fast food workers deserve to be underpaid because they are unskilled, lazy jerks who aren’t putting their lives on the line serving in wars that a large portion of the country and, indeed, the world think are unjust and possibly manufactured to pad the coffers of warmonger whose own children are never placed in danger. Those fast food workers don’t deserve to make more money than soldiers make, when they have “chosen” to seek out jobs meant for teenagers.
Ignoring the fact that if fast food workers were paid a decent wage, other jobs would pay more to attract better workers, and the whole country would benefit because people actually earned enough to do more than barely survive, clearly this person believes that there are no former or current military personnel working in fast food, nor could there possibly be any college graduates unable to find work because the jobs they trained for have been shipped overseas.
As you can tell, this really pissed me off.
It made me angry enough that I vocalized the wish that karma would track this person down and lay a hefty whoop-ass dose of justice upon their vile little head. I was angry enough to declare them a judgmental ass without enough life experience to begin to grasp the ugliness of what they had posted.
And the fact that I reacted that way not only pissed me off, it made me sad. Why did it make me sad?
Because I don’t want to be the person who responds to that ugliness with anger. I want to be the kind of person who can respond to that with a genuine outpouring of compassion for the pain that person must live with in order to be that unkind. I want to be the sort of person who opens my own heart to send a flood of loving, healing kindness to that unhappy person. I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t judge the judgmental nature of others. I am deeply disappointed at just how spectacularly I failed to be the kind of person I want to be. That’s why reacting with anger makes me sad.
But why did I react with anger to begin with? Partially because there is so much unkindness, endlessly spewed forth in posts similar to that one. Partly because it feels futile to try and explain to people that kindness works better than hatred. I’ve got me a hefty dose of sheer frustration - which means that again, I am not managing to live the life I am trying to live. I need the Serenity Prayer tattooed on the insides of my eyelids!
I cannot change other people, nor should I want to. They have the right to be who they are. The best I can do is be compassionate and accepting. I did not do my best.
But the other part of why this made me so angry - and it took me all night to figure this out - is that I do feel compassion for that person, because I can remember being that person. I can remember a time when I thought homeless people just needed to make an effort, drug addicts chose to be addicted, poor people just needed to try harder. I can remember being negative about random strangers’ appearances, behaviors, and attitudes. I can remember being the superior little bitch who couldn’t grasp a struggle I hadn’t personally experienced.
And because I can remember being that person, failing to forgive this person for being less than the Ideal even I failed to meet, is triply damning to me. I preach forgiveness a lot. Forgive others because they are acting from painful places you cannot see. Forgive yourself, because you too, are acting from within a place of pain. Forgive, I say, repeatedly. And driving around thinking about this for hours, I realized something Very Important.
I failed to be the person I want to be for a really big reason.
I failed to come close to my ideal self because I have consistently failed to forgive myself for having been the judgmental little bitch I described above. I have worked a long time to become kinder than the selfish, spoiled child I once was. I really have come a long way. Seven league boots strides. But I’m ashamed of that past person, and that means I’m not coming to ME from a place of loving kindness, or at least not nearly as kind as I could be.
Forgiveness is hard. It’s hard because you have to pick off the scab and let it bleed a bit, you have to slather on the ointment of compassionate seeing, and you have skip the bandage, so the wound gets air - healing needs room to breathe. I’m healing now. And from my place of imperfect healing-in-progress compassion, I’m sending out a huge bucket of loving kindness and gratitude to the person whose post made me so angry to begin with.
Eyes and wounds and heart a little more open.
Namasté.
