Make Friends, Lose Friends
Some people, maybe more than some, think that if The Shit went down, they’d be on the side of Righteous Rebellion, like the hero (always a hero) in a sci-fi-ish movie with lots of grungy interiors and wince-inducing character or place names. But many of them wouldn’t. In times of stress, many people capitulate or step back or refuse to discuss it or say it will pass and just leave it alone or let it slide. In times like that, and at others, it can feel like or be survival. And it’s usually your choice. Bad one sometimes, but there it is. Seen, dealt with, tolerated at least, it can then molt and shed.
One of my crackpot-ish hypotheses: Collaborators v. Non-Collaborators. No matter the love or respect for The Group, which is why we have society that works much of the time and I can be sure than most people stop at red lights and give me the correct change, there comes a point when people divide, between the ones who bend or pretend so well that they barely know they’re pretending anymore, and the ones who in some way, no matter how small but sometimes on a larger scale, refuse to capitulate, refuse to agree, refuse to make nice. If it’s wrong, it is. I can’t take that back for you. And I won’t lie to you about it. Or you. I don’t believe in I-thought-we-were-___. We could be ___. All the time.
But, see, I’m just built that way….
I am a sympathetic person. But I also believe in standards, limits, consequences, lumps taken, lessons learned. I’ll cry with you and still give you the F. I’ll feel my heart breaking apart for you but still say you need to swallow your consequences. My favorite The First 48 detective tells young men to “man up.” I feel that.
My students? Ouch. Some, maybe more than some, are really going to hate me in about 4 weeks.
photo courtesy of #9, used under this Creative Commons license
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His gesture was far more childish and self-willed than mine, and not only on the surface. When I compare the deeper conclusions that Hitler and I drew from the same painful experience—the one fury, defiance and the resolve to become a politician, the other doubt as to the validity of the rules of the game, and a horrified foreboding of the unpredictability of life—then I cannot help thinking that the reaction of the eleven-year-old boy was more mature than that of the twenty-nine-year-old adult.
Undoubtedly, at that moment it was written in the stars that I could never be on friendly terms with Hitler’s Reich (23).
Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000, 2002.
I don’t think that’s a crack pot-ish hypothesis.