I want to tell you guys something. Two things, actually.
They both happened in the last quarter. They are not unusual things, but they happened to me directly. I see them as things to learn from, to move forward from, and I invite you to talk about and comment on them with a forward-looking lens. Now, more than ever in our fractured times, this is the best view.
1 Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda. Jim and I drove to Utah and did a race together. We spent time with some friends and took the opportunity, on the drives to and from, to see a few things I’d never seen before, like an awesome bookstore in Salt Lake City and the Hoover Dam.
The night before we saw the Hoover Dam, we had dinner at the Boulder City Brewhouse. It was right across the street from the historic hotel we were staying it; it had good beer…we were happy.
Towards the end of our meal we noticed one of the patrons leering at a waitress. He seemed to be a regular, because they were making conversation, but it became obvious that he was going above and beyond. “How you doing?” she said, for instance, and he replied, “Good. Just waiting for you to offer home delivery.” (Emphasis his.) He openly gaped at her, eyeballing her up and down as she worked and walked around him. It was no surprise when a male waiter, the manager, we guessed, ended up taking the guy’s order.
On the way out I felt a real sense of regret. I balked at the door, and then again on the pathway just outside, wanting so badly to have said something to her. Obviously the restaurant management was aware of the problem and had done the right thing.
Do I think we’d have gone up to the guy and told him to knock it off? Not likely, for a number of reasons: The restaurant clearly was handling it in their own way; Boulder City is a small town and I’m a tourist; I would rather empower her than step in on her behalf; etcetera. Do I think we should have gone to the waitress and told her we’d noticed the bad behavior, and then also flagged the management, even if they were already doing something about it? Yeah, I do. We both left feeling pretty disgusted, with ourselves and the whole situation.
2. Yeah, I’m Not From There. Some of you may know that I do a reasonable amount of public speaking about nonprofits I’m involved in. These talks involve me going, hat in hand, to service organizations and telling them about the cause. Sometimes I’m invited in to talk about my work. Either way, it’s good, clean, fun, and work I’m glad to do.
Until it wasn’t. I met my host in Seoul in May, at a convention for this particular service group. By way of introducing me to one of his club members at a talk I was doing earlier this month, he said, “This is Yi Shun. I rescued her from the DMZ.”
Folks, I was utterly bamboozled. I made the only pivot I could think of, turned to the guy he was introducing me to, a full-on, plaid-wearing white guy farmer, and said, “Yeah. Where’d he rescue you from? Nicaragua?” Predictably, the guy was confused. I felt only vaguely satisfied and went on with my event.
Do I wish I’d called my host out? Perhaps. Does it incense me to recall this event? Yes. There was so much wrong with this commentary, all the way down to the making fun of the awful plight of people who actually do try to escape from North Korea.
You are by now picking up on the pattern. In the last quarter alone I have stayed silent at least twice, where my first instinct was to speak out. Obviously there are smart ways to do this–we don’t live in vacuums, and so we must take these actions considering our entire ecosystems, whether the ecosystem be a small restaurant or the wider world of service clubs and my responsibility to the group I am representing.
But the time for staying silent has gone by. Politesse can co-exist with a lot of things. A well-placed word or a long, hard stare can fix a lot of things. Letting a long pause go by likely would have registered my deep displeasure at my host’s racist commentary at the appropriate time. A quiet word to the manager and waitress both would have at least let them know we supported their handling of the problem.
But silence, as they say, registers complacency, and that time is dead.
This Thanksgiving, someone’s drunk Uncle Jerry is going to say something bigoted, racist, or just plain stupid. Bitching at drunk uncle Jerry himself won’t do anything–he’s drunk–but we can at least exhibit some extreme pissiness. There is a whole table of Thanksgiving revelers who need to know that this shit is not okay.
Call it as you see it. “See something, say something,” is applicable to all kinds of situations.
Me? I see a note to my service-club host in progress. While I won’t out him here, he needs to know that what he said was hurtful and wrong, and I’m going to hang the donation. Some things come with too high a price tag.
