So I ranted about peace last entry, about how we are all God’s children and even when someone is actively out to hurt us, it’s still best to see them as humans, to have empathy, and to consider them to be ultimately equals on the same team. It seems so counterintuitive… but I also realized that I left out a big part of it: boundaries. People have always told me that I’d get my ass handed to me in life with this attitude and from my perspective I’ve very much proven them wrong but sometimes the way I talk about it can be confusing. I’m not suggesting we should all be pushovers or that we need to give a dollar to every homeless person we see. Sometimes we need to make the hard decisions. You can’t feed your kids cake for dinner no matter how much they cry or pull at your heartstrings. Sometimes it’s necessary to make hard decisions that hurt people.
I used to watch a lot of that show Intervention and I think that offers a good example of what I’m talking about. That show is about families coming together to put their foot down and draw up boundaries. In the short term it’s usually painful but in the long run you’re doing what’s best for them and you. But through all of it, you’re still family, no matter how poor your decisions or how much you’ve hurt each other.
Maybe what I’m trying to say is that believing in peace the way I do does not automatically translate to weakness… but unfortunately sometimes it does and if you want to believe in peace which you absolutely should because it’s wildly beneficial, you need to remember to be strong. Your kindness is yours to give, not for others to take. Kindness is a strategy.
My words aren’t coming together this entry like I’d hoped.
Let’s try an example: I was in a party planning group a few years ago where we had one person who we all voted to ban, mainly because he’d said “they should have all been shot” in reference to Black Lives Matter protestors in an online forum that essentially had nothing to do with our group. I voted to ban him too. I think if you’d read my previous entry, you’d assume that I’d want to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and just welcome him and go out of my way to show him kindness. But no. You have to set boundaries and I knew that banning him would cut off some of his social opportunities and possibly drive him deeper into his hate. But I voted to ban anyway because you gotta have boundaries. You have to take reasonable steps to keep you and your guests safe.
The other organizers did the standard thing which is to have one person send him an official message saying “sorry, you’re not a good fit for our group”, with no explanation. Then you block him. This is what some lawyer somewhere says we should do.
But I don’t go along with that. Lawyers speak from an us-vs-them perspective. They don’t understand how humans work. They build up rules and walls like we’re robots or evil spiders rather than thinking breathing humans who grow and change.
So I reached out to him and basically told the truth and said that we have members who support BLM and even if they don’t, talk of shooting people is scary to us and we want our guests to feel safe. I myself am a police brutality survivor whose life was sort of emotionally saved by BLM. I don’t want to feel like guests at my parties want me dead and if I’m gonna throw a party I have a right to invite or not invite whoever I want. I forget what I actually said and I’m too lazy to dig through my old messages but I did my best to still see him as an equal and be respectful while still speaking the whole truth about why he wasn’t welcome anymore. I think I owned up to the fact that there’s a huge double standard, like these kink/LGBTQ groups talk big talk about how everyone is welcome but then we ban people over one nasty online comment, and we ignore the liberals posting memes about murdering rich people but ban conservatives who talk about murdering BLM supporters.
But that’s how it is, you know. Sometimes there’s double standards in social structures. Sometimes you need to exclude people in order to get the right vibe for your party. It’s sucks but that’s how it is.
But anyway, we went back and forth and started discussing immigration and he talked about his feelings regarding being banned and overall I found it a very productive conversation even though I didn’t convince him to change any of his problematic perspectives. I started feeling rather bad about banning him.
Then we ran into each other at an unrelated party and I realized that I had made a really really good decision about messaging him and trying so hard to have empathy and see him as an equal, because he started treating me like a friend. Like, yes I banned him, but I had the balls to tell him the truth about it instead of hiding behind the block button, so he respected me now. So we chit chatted for kind of a while.
And the more he talked, the more I realized we’d made the correct choice in banning him. For example, he bragged to me about punching a doctor who was trying to treat his injuries.
But if I had chosen to go the standard us-vs-them lawyer approved route, well he would have seen me as an enemy and best case scenario we ignore each other at this party and I have to look nervously over my shoulder the whole time. Or it could have gone worse, probably not actually violent, but there definitely could have been some party drama.
But at the same time, voting to ban him was the right decision.
So I guess what I’m advocating is a sort of “middle ground” where we are devoted to peace and kindness but only with healthy, well defined boundaries that we are open and honest and direct about.
So that was one situation where I handled it well. Most cases in my life, I did not handle things so well. I either let people take advantage of me and kept my mouth shut about my own needs until I was ready to explode, or I would get all rude and look at people as an enemy, condemn them as evil, like I did toward police officers for many years, and then what… if I did that I’d get stuck in a hate loop that helped no one.
But once you know the techniques of good conflict management and boundary setting and have the confidence to use them, then embracing peace, empathy and a “We are all God’s children” kind of attitude, suddenly becomes both easy and incredibly rewarding.