Thanks For Keeping Me Safe

A child raising money for a church just came by the house. Bad timing: he interrupted me while I was reading an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center about gay bashing and the intolerable silence about the issue that still seems to be coming from many churches and church leaders. I had no money for him, though I told him, “I’ll feel safer once I know that the legal definition of marriage has been enshrined in the constitution so that it can never change in any way. If gay marriage became legal," I pointed out, "I could no longer use sanctimonious self-satisfaction in my personal heterosexuality as a means of continuing my tacit acceptance of the unequal treatment of homosexuals. In such a world, surely the living would envy the dead. Thanks for keeping me safe.”


As he left (he at least understood the part about me having no money) I remembered something I learned recently as part of my education in education, but which is (or at least should be) well known to most educators: when you talk to kids, it’s important not to be a sarcastic jerk. It isn’t because kids don’t understand sarcasm—they do. It’s because in the teen or pre-teen brain, sarcasm doesn’t translate into general irony: it is perceived as personal antagonism. It is a speech pattern and tone they use among themselves when tension is high, often accompanied by aggressive posturing. It is a part of their hierarchical behavior, though in some circumstances, it can be a form of bullying. My point isn’t to skewer myself for hypocrisy, others are usually willing to step up when that is required, only to point out that learning to relate to kids requires, first, a lot of unlearning.


So, sorry kid. I should have expressed myself better. I was not wrong to share my views with you, but I could have started by asking you what your own views were, rather than by assuming they were the same as the views of your church, which, I must also acknowledge, I have not read or heard anything about in ten years. For all I know, your church has made the cessation of gay bashing its highest priority. Instead of cash, I should have given you the Southern Poverty Law Center newsletter I was reading - they are replaceable. But I should not have been so clever, smug, or sarcastic.


Sadly, this wasn't the first time (even this week) when I was clever, only to discover later that cleverness wasn't really what the situation had called for. Cleverness is certainly the most powerful hammer I possess—but that still doesn't make everything into a nail.


The problem is, I’ve practiced at being clever for years, and it took a long time before I felt as though I could use wit to successfully express myself. But wit, even when well intentioned, generally comes with at least a small dose of sarcasm. It is a dose most people tolerate perfectly well, particularly those who are over 18, those who grew up speaking English as a first language, those with perfect hearing, those who are emotionally secure, those without deficiencies in information processing, and those with no personal connection to the subject being treated sarcastically. In other words: not everyone.


I often use wit to express my moral opinions through reductio ad absurdum. I often choose to respond to any new situation with (attempted) wit, spotlighting the ironic aspects before I am silently seized by the ones that will make me want to rip out my own heart. Sometimes I exercise my cunning linguistics just for fun, "making sure everyone knows how smart I think I am," as my worst critic would say. (And no, my worst critic isn’t me—I have at least one who is even worse.) While reminding myself that not everything our worst critics says of us is true, I won’t deny feeling gratified when my wit is appreciated. Making people laugh doesn’t bind them to me as friends for life – nor, sadly enough, does it make women fall in love with me – but wit does tend to draw me together with other wits, in whose presense I can at least be sure of a shared joy in playful language. What that usually means is that by the end of any given evening—I'm at the same table as all the other jokers in the room. Clearly, this is both a good thing and a bad one.


Giving up sarcasm is not going to be easy, but it appears that give it up, at least to some extent, I must. So in case I don’t have another chance to say it—thank you, sarcasm, for allowing me to set to right so many of society's ills, while, at the same time, providing me with the life of personal achievement, true love, worldly respect, constant companionship, and fulfilling work that I now enjoy.