Everybody is somebody’s villain
If there’s anything difficult about nonfiction writing, it’s closing the gap between the story and the reader. It’s easy enough to tell what happened and why it matters, but that doesn’t bring people along for the ride. Managing a reader’s reaction means tapping into their point of view.
If you read through to the end of one of my stories and don’t get it, that means I failed. Maybe I didn’t convince you with the premise or didn’t provide sufficient evidence. Sometimes I try too hard to sound clever and leave breadcrumbs for ideas that would be better served by explicit signage. Sometimes I’m just unintentionally oblique.
Listen to There Aren’t Any White Hats on the Internet
It's important to remember that, while there are two sides to every story, each side has a bad guy. One of them is…podcasts.apple.com
Social media is the place I’m most likely to miss the mark because I assume everyone occupies the same headspace, mine. I forget that I’m only the hero of my own story. Maybe we should amend “There are two sides to every story,” to add, “and every story needs a bad guy.”
No matter how many Rashomons or Wickeds make it into pop culture, it’s still an easy observation to overlook: If we’re the good guy in our story, we’re the bad guy in the alternate version. That means that sometimes we’re the bad guy and don’t notice. Sometimes we’re the bad guy and don’t care.
I Am Legend
With enough moral certainty in their heart, a person can do a shocking amount of evil whether or not that is their goal. The doctor seeing a cure in I Am Legend is a barbaric monster among the test subjects.
On a much lower-stakes level, one person’s cultural critic is another person’s insufferable troll. Intent has very little to do with what we say or write if we’re unclear or just flat-dead mistaken.
By those lights, I shouldn’t have been surprised that a recent (overly snarky) Facebook post of mine drew as much hate as it did.
I was trying too hard to be clever and missed an opportunity. The photo started a conversation I didn’t intend to have about a point I wasn’t trying to make.
What I wanted to say was that if you claim to represent the Delmar Fire Department and enjoy the privileges that having a special license plate affords you, maybe leave the racist, anti-woman rhetoric off the back of your car.
For some backstory, the Delmar Fire Department has been haunted by its misogynist culture. This is just a cold fact, not something I observed. What I have observed over the 30 years I’ve lived here is a culture that stopped evolving after it lost its slaves and had to get a real job. It is a core prejudice that I struggle (and continually fail) to overcome, something that, having seen, I can’t unsee.
I assumed it was clear that the problem wasn’t the sticker, but rather the public service claim advertised next to it.
I’ve written before that ignorance isn’t a bad thing and that we shouldn’t hold it against people. Stupidity, though, which is the conviction that ignorance is your birthright, is another story altogether.
When I posted the photo, I provoked more outrage than intended. It was just me whining about living in such a backward place as white supremacy thrashes through its death rattle.
I wanted to evoke the image of a Black family or single mom coming upon this truck as they pulled up to their still-smoldering house. I wanted to say that this kind of contempt for the people they claim to serve was beneath the town firefighters.
I assumed it was clear that the problem wasn’t the sticker, but rather the public service claim advertised next to it. It is an excellent picture of this part of culture, so wrapped up in homogeneous entitlement that it is beyond self-reflection.
A staggering number of commenters said the driver was neither a racist nor a MILF-banger. They offered this as evidence that I was a humorless snowflake, out to find things that offend me. It’s a counter-prejudice that, like my own, is based loosely on fact.
I think we all know so-called social justice warriors who seem to be less present in a conversation than waiting to pounce on anachronistic language, people for whom there’s no discussion only a list of preferred and banned terms.
I’m not one of them, but the bad guy in their story is. The bad guy in their story totally drives around looking for something to be offended by.
Deranged in Delmar
The Delmar Fire Department gives well beyond firefighting services: going to schools, supporting pretty much every town event, and doing the necessary and important fundraising to keep their equipment up to standard.
No member hasn’t seen that sticker and dismissed it as just a joke. That makes sense. They are the audience. The joke was written with them in mind. It’s unlikely they see it as any stupider than the ol’ pull-my-finger gag, and it’s critical to admit that they have a point.
Returning to ignorance versus stupidity, I think we all believe that a joke told without malice can just be bad or tone-deaf. Among my friends, I’m certain I would win the award for most likely to hurt someone’s feelings with a “witty” observation.
If I’m trying to be funny and end up saying something hurtful, it is stupid to insist that other people don’t have a sense of humor. Maybe they don’t, but the problem could just as easily be that I missed the mark.
If everyone around you is too thin-skinned, it is possible they’re not the problem. On the flip side, trying to shame someone isn’t any more productive than trying to badger them into having a better sense of humor.
Shamelessness in the name of freedom
Shame only works as a social tool if there is a cost for bad behavior. It’s meaningless among people who tend more toward tribalism than conversation. The idea of being ashamed (or even wrong) is undermined in a world where we all are just misunderstood or kidding.
When I decided to take the photo and share it, I had no illusions that I would “shame” anyone into anything. Shamelessness, like stupidity, is a badge people wear to prove that they have agency or (as they likely think of it) “liberty.”
I wanted to call attention to ignorant entitlement, this attitude that a person who is willing to serve their community is always beyond reproach on every matter.
Letting Your Fuck Flag Fly
Trigger warning: This story contains frequent use of the “F” word.bytonyrusso.medium.com
Although I didn’t set out to prove anything, in retrospect the comments along those lines weren’t surprising. Criticism and threats fell into two loose categories: “Move if you don’t like it,” and “You wouldn’t be so smug if this person was saving your life.”
That’s the one that got to me the most. There are so many people who join up to serve their community, who answer the call to service out of a genuine disposition toward saving lives and working for the public good.
An unfortunate minority understands that finagling their way into a uniform is the only chance at getting respect they will ever have. It’s a critique as old as uniforms, to be sure, but the way you behave will influence the way people think of the uniform.
I have a friend who was in the Army. He told me that once he was in charge of other soldiers he was fastidious about his behavior. He didn’t go around calling other people out but was very conscious about how he carried himself. He understood that the burden of leadership was living above standards and expectations. For him, being an example meant never wondering whether someone was watching. It meant being un-indictable.
The burden of service
Those are the folks I think about when I see some idiot hiding behind the presumption of heroism. So many good people live their public and private lives with the full understanding that their vocation requires exemplary behavior. It is a tragedy that they get lumped in with people who want to be automatic heroes based solely on their career choice.
That is what I should have written.
What made my observation tone-deaf was forgetting that not everyone agrees that there is a difference between the job and the person doing it. Criticizing one vile joke on some man-child’s pickup truck is no different from demeaning everyone who has ever put themselves in harm’s way for a stranger, according to this line of thinking. The fact that it is wrongheaded is secondary.
I’ll never know if there is a way to point out how counter-productive it is for a volunteer fireman to play into the racist, sexist stereotype. I get the sense that there’s a lot of head-shaking at how people are so sensitive nowadays that it’s become “frowned upon” to play grab-ass in the firehouse.
Of course, all of that is on my neighbors and me. We won’t have a conversation about what it means to set an example or to represent the town. That’s not the kind of town we want.
Surely this is my own prejudice coming through again, but when I look around I see a desperation to prevent evolution. So many people seem to want to recapture a time when everyone respected authority, Blacks knew their place, and women didn’t make a federal case about the occasional errant hand, especially when they were the ones who insisted on working in a man’s world.
If there’s one thing that has always been clear about living here it’s that people who don’t like the way things have always been should move, or at least keep their mouths shut.
I can’t do the first and will never do the second, but it would be stupid of me not to learn the lesson. This should have been a flame war about whether or not the MILF-banger was disrespecting the fire department, not whether or why it offended me.
There was a commenter who worried I was painting the fire service with too broad a brush and rightly pointed out that it was unfair to make it more about the fire department than the sticker.
That might have been a conversation worth having, but my snarky word choice made it about my fragile sensibilities instead of our collective callousness.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.