Black, white or grey? Finding the balance between anger and forgiveness.

Hi guys, now my regular readers will know that I've had some mental health issues of late and it has been a rough period for me. I'm not here to talk about that as I'm okay now, like I'm copping, I'm functioning and whilst not everything is resolved (will every problem in my life ever be totally resolved?) I'm doing fine as in I'm able to function. I can work, I can go to the gym, I can sleep and I'll get round to sort out all the problems in my life eventually. So one close friend sent me a link to a Ted Talk video about dealing with difficult situations, begging me to watch it. I was open minded enough and so I watched it, so it was like your typical Ted Talk video where this American woman (I shall refer to her as Ms Tedtalk) talked about the power of empathy and acceptance - she was some kind of social researcher and she had been sent to interview this extreme right wing Republican woman. Now this Texan woman didn't simply vote for Trump, no her head was full of ridiculous conspiracy theories about everything and everyone. She refused to get her children vaccinated because she didn't know what they put in those vaccines - we're not just talking about the Covid vaccine here but all forms of vaccines. Yet somehow, she was a chain smoker and was happy with all the toxins she was inhaling from all those cigarettes. You get the idea, Ms Tedtalk had been sent to interview the most vile woman in Texas and yet somehow, by suspending her judgment and embracing this woman rather than judging her, Ms Tedtalk managed to find something that allowed them to connect, by focusing on this one thing they had in common, Ms Tedtalk managed to somehow humanize this vile woman from Texas and even feel a sense of connection with her by focusing on the positives and not so much ignoring the negatives, but embracing them. By the end of that interview, she claimed that she even felt love for this vile woman from Texas and it was at that point that I thought, this is why I am sceptical about Ted Talks like that. Just because she was an articulate and eloquent speaker on Ted Talks doesn't mean she is always right. 

The reason why I had a problem Ms Tedtalk's attitude was because the vile woman from Texas had done absolutely nothing to make herself more likable and yet somehow, in this situation, by offering some form of love to this vile woman from Texas, it felt like moral masturbation. "You are so nasty yet I am taking all your anger and returning it with love - look at me, I am so holy, I have am so kind, I have a one way ticket to heaven for being such an angel. I am love personified. That's why I'm giving this Ted Talk to teach you all to be as forgiving, kind and wonderful like me." Look, if that's the way she deals with the nasty people she meets in life and if this approach helps her resolve whatever conflicts that she may encounter , then that's her choice of course. I think it's quite an extreme to respond to hate with love and it did come across as quasi-religious. So let's call this kind of response 'white', so I'm now going to go to the other extreme of the scale and look at how someone I know responds to a person who has wronged him. My friend Don (not his real name) has broken up over three years ago yet when you scroll through his social media posts, it is still full of hateful, angry posts directed at his ex - Don never mentions his ex by name but when you see an angry rant, it is pretty obvious what it is about. Take Instagram for example: when you post an Instagram story that's a video, the time limit is 15 seconds. When you simply post a picture, the time limit is about 6 seconds - so even if I am trying to see a photo in more detail, I don't have much time to do that and may have to scroll back to get a few more seconds. Don would post this wall of text that would be impossible to read in 6 seconds, but I'd be like, it's yet another angry rant that nobody will read - certainly not his ex. Maybe it is one way for him to vent his anger and let off some steam this way, but is it really making him feel any better? I don't think so as these angry posts just keep coming, day after day, week after week, month after month. This is a can of worms that I don't even want to talk to Don about, quite frankly I don't know what to say, like, "you need to deal with this anger, it's clearly eating you up and you're in a lot of pain." So Don's approach is 'black', the complete opposite of Ms Ted Talk and clearly this is not right either, as all I see is this endless torrent of anger with no end in sight. 

So allow me to share with you what happened in my gym tonight and I shall analyze how Ms Tedtalk would respond to it and how Don might respond. My gymnastics club is in a big multi-purpose sports centre where we have different sports activities. You have the core sports centre staff who would unlock the front doors in the morning, lock up the building at closing time, make sure the toilets are clean and take payment from customers at the reception desk. Then within each individual sport, you have the coaching staff who actually teach the lessons - so on Sundays, I volunteer at my gymnastics club and I coach the adult class there. That means my students are all over 18, with some of them in their 40s like me and it's usually a very pleasant environment. But today, after the class, my students had just left and I was tidying up - one of the sports centre managers (so he's the guy who locks up the building at closing time, if there's no tissue paper in the toilet, you ask him for more etc, so he isn't a gymnastics coach; we'll call him Col, not his real name) decided to let two of his friends come into the gym. I tried to stop them but Col said, oh they're my friends I just want to show them around. I didn't want to get into an argument with Col, so I made it clear, they're not supposed to be in here but if you just want to let them take a look them do so quickly then they must leave. But instead of doing that, his two friends started running all over the gym as if it was a big playground and I was worried that they were going to get hurt. It was at that point when I realized that these two men had come to the sports centre with their families, so a big group of women and children (at least ten of them) came into the gym and the children started running around - it seems they were a part of a bigger group of people and I was worried even more people were going to come into the gym. It was at that point when I told Col, no this is not allowed, they must all leave at once. To be clear, Col was totally in the wrong, he wasn't supposed to do things like that, sure his friends could always pay to attend one of the gymnastics classes there, but Col couldn't just invite his friends to come in to use the facilities without being a part of a class, he'd broken the rules. 

Thankfully, some of the mothers in the group realized that I was serious and started herding their children out of the gym but one of the men (who was amongst the first two who came in) started shouting at me, "mate, you need to calm the fuck down, this isn't your fucking house. Col said we could come in so if you have a fucking problem, take it up with Col." I calmly explained to him that I'm the most senior gymnastics coach in the gym and Col has not right to let anyone in without my permission, so I had every right to ask him to leave at once. It wasn't just the swearing, it was the very aggressive attitude and I thought for a moment that he was spoiling for a fight, but luckily one of the women in the group (perhaps his wife?) asked him to leave and I swiftly locked the door of the gym from the inside after that to stop them from coming back in. Later when I confronted Col about what happened, he simply refused to take any responsibility for what happened - he claimed that thought his friends were just going to walk around the gym rather than try to jump up and down on the equipment; then when the children ran in, he didn't give them permission to run in, they just did it spontaneously and so he couldn't have been responsible for that. Anyway, I made it clear to him that I would never allow this to happen again and that I would make a report to the head coach about the incident. This was when Col started to panic a bit as he was worried that he would get into trouble, he start downplaying what happened, "come on, they were only in here for a few minutes at most and it was not like anyone got hurt. And as for my mate, aah that's just the way he talks, he didn't mean any harm even if he doesn't know how to talk properly like you posh people. He's just a bit rough, innit?" Anyway, I had already made a complaint to my head coach about the incident and she is going to take it up with Col's line manager to make sure that Col would at least receive a written warning about having broken the rules of the sports centre. So that was what happened at the gym tonight, but allow me to describe what happened after I got home. 

There was a part of me that was upset with Col's friend who was very rude and aggressive with me, it was very unpleasant to be spoken to like that. But I kept my cool and spoke to him calmly, instead of losing my temper. Sure I can get Col punished for what he did (and somehow I feel really good about that), but I can't get his rude friend punished and that was the part that bothered me. So Ms Tedtalk would probably suggest that I could have embraced that rude guy's imperfections, try to find a way to connect with him (perhaps by offering him a free gymnastics lesson) and turn that enemy into a new friend, thus fixing the problem by turning that anger into love. Obviously, that man was curious enough about the gym and he might have seen me training my gymnasts earlier, he might have been fascinated by the somersaults we were performing and desperately wanted to learn. Ms Tedtalk would have asked me to start from there, establish rapport, find a connection, embrace the fact that he was a very rude working class person who got aggressive when he didn't get his way and somehow respond with love, generosity and kindness instead of anger. Nah, I can't do that, no way - his friend was such a rude person and I should have never allowed Col to let them into the gym in the first place. Likewise for Col, he did something wrong but refused to take any responsibility for his mistake. Again, I know Ms Tedtalk would have asked me to find a way to make things work with reconcile things with Col, to try to embrace all of Col's imperfections as both spend so much time in that sports centre. However, I am also conscious of the fact that I don't want to follow in Don's footsteps - now if he was in a similar position, he would be very angry with Col and all of those people who came into the gym. Oh he would complain about this not just to the head coach but I imagine someone like Don might make a complaint directly to the management of the sports centre in order to punish Col for what he had done - again, I think that's quite extreme and I'd rather not do that as I don't think that more anger is going to make me feel any better. No instead I believe there is a more sensible compromise called grey: mid-way between white and black. 

There are two key components to shape my 'grey' response: firstly, Col's two friends wanted to do what I do and they couldn't. They wish they could but unless you are willing to train as hard as me, you are not going to be a good gymnast like me. One of them in fact was rather obese and that was the reason why my initial reaction was, oh no that fat guy is gonna hurt himself so bad. In short, I'm the brilliant gymnast and they could only wish to be as brilliant as I am in the gym. Now the second response is to something the rude man said to me, he said, "this isn't your fucking gym." I could have responded by saying, "whilst I don't own this gym or the sports centre, do you have any idea how rich I am compared to you or your mate Col? I may volunteer as a coach here today but I work in investment banking and I earn in one month what you earn in a year - I could easily buy this gym if I wanted to." I could've said that but I didn't for a simple reason: I always abide by the rule that calling someone stupid doesn't make me any cleverer. Calling someone poor doesn't make me any richer. Calling someone ugly doesn't make me any more beautiful. Calling someone fat doesn't make me any thinner. Calling someone unpopular doesn't make me any more well liked - I could go on, but you get the idea. Insulting that rude man and even getting into a heated argument with him wouldn't make me feel any better, I don't want to go down Don's route of allowing anger to control my emotions. Yet I don't want to do what Ms Tedtalk does and offer unconditional love to everyone - instead, I simply acknowledge to myself that I'm so much better than people like Col and his rude friend, thus that is why I'm very grateful for the way my life has turned out and as long as I know that fact, my 'grey' response is to simply say to myself, "you don't need to waste any time or energy with these people, they are working class trash whilst you're so much better than all of them." I certainly don't feel the need to forgive or embrace them the way Ms Tedtalk would, but at the same time, I'm making a conscious decision to let my head coach deal with it.

I have another problem with Ms Tedtalk's approach though, let's go back to the example she gave regarding that vile woman from Texas who refused to vaccinate her baby against anything (not just Covid, but she is against all vaccines), the baby has no choice in the matter and is left vulnerable to a whole range of diseases that could cause serious illness and death; the baby cannot simply make an appointment at the hospital to get vaccinated. That's an act of a mother being criminally negligent and deliberately putting her baby at risk, that's a morally repugnant act. Yet somehow Ms Tedtalk has either chosen to ignore that by shoving it into a blind spot (oh how convenient) or she has chosen to embrace this moral flaw and accept it - which I find bizarre to say the least. There's a huge difference between embracing something that is foreign or unknown and something that's completely illegal, criminal and immoral. For example, I introduce to you a new form of music you're not familiar with and there's a concert this weekend - I say to you, keep an open mind, I know you've never heard of the band from Senegal performing this kind of music before but it will be a whole new experience. In this case, you could embrace a new culture, a brand new experience, an art form from West Africa and go to that concert. But for Ms Tedtalk to embrace the faults of that vile woman from Texas? No, this is not acceptable, I have a problem with that approach because you would end up embracing anything and everything with no moral filter. Ms Tedtalk wants to have an infinite amount of love for everyone in the world, but this comes at a high price to herself because she is making people like me doubt her ability to exercise sound judgment. I'm sure you have heard this phrase used by religious people before: embrace the sinner but not the sin. That phrase is used by Christians but they demand that the sinners must turn away from their sin before becoming a Christian: so their love isn't unconditional.

Let's go back to that incident in the gym when that man reacted by swearing at me in an aggressive manner when I told him to leave the gym. I think he reacted that way because of his lack of social skills - he could have handled the situation a lot better if he simply came to me calmly and apologized for the kids running into the gym. If he had spoken to me more calmly and politely, he would have increased the chances me allowing at least him to stay on for a bit longer, as long as he recognized my authority there as the most senior coach and he was going to do it with my permission. When you are in this kind of situation, shouting at the other person, using that kind of very abusive language is not likely to get you what you want - at best, you get to vent your anger for a moment but my reaction would simply be, "you must leave at once, get out." His choice of words and actions in that brief exchange told me a lot about his total lack of social skills and his social class - that's his problem and I refused to make it mine. I wasn't prepared to engage with someone like that, I wasn't even going to try to fix that problem by explaining to him why he was never going to get what he wanted by speaking to others that way. I sure as hell wasn't going to do what Ms Tedtalk suggested and embrace that man for all his flaws as he had done absolutely nothing to encourage me to be nice to him. Her approach would involve finding a way to embrace his flaws and that would then make it my problem when I make it very clear, there's no way I am allowing his problems to become mine - I am refusing to get involved. It's not my problem, I am simply walking away from it and disassociating myself from it. But when Don stays angry at his ex and for the purpose of the argument, let's assume that it was his ex's fault to have caused Don all that hurt so Don is still carrying that burden of anger by refusing to let go of it. 

The ideal outcome would be for that rude man to receive some form of punishment for having been rude to me in the gym, but that's me thinking like a primary school student where you want to run to the nearest teacher and scream out, "teacher  he said a bad word, he was very rude, punish him!" Oh yes I admit, there's a part of me that still thinks that way and I'm sure many of us still have that instinct. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a desire for some kind of law and order in the world we live in, so everything makes sense as long as people follow the rules. This is why we get angry when we read a story about say a reckless driver who kills an innocent pedestrian getting away with a relatively lenient punishment - not only are we outraged by the senseless killing of an innocent victim, but we want to see the murderer receive a punishment that reflects the severity of the crime even if the outcome of the case really has no bearing on our everyday lives. We crave this 'justice' because we want the world we live in to make sense to us, especially if we have been law abiding citizens who have made so much effort to always follow the rules. The way I deal with it is by looking at the wider context: if this man has such poor social skills, then he would be punished everyday by the world as he would struggle to form good relationships at work - his colleagues with better social skills are more likely to be promoted than him. When it comes to friends, he is left only with people like Col with poor social skills and so Col really doesn't mind or care if others have equally poor social skills whilst others who have minimum standards when it comes to social skills will shun him. His poor social skills are going to give him a papercut every single day of his life, whilst each individual papercut isn't going to kill him, he is undoubtedly going to suffer the consequences of that in the long run over so many different aspects of his life and that for me is a form of karma, it is the world punishing him so I don't need to punish him. 

Some people might approach a situation like that with a more religious perspective - they would not personally try to punish those who have wronged them but would expect their 'god' to do that on their behalf. I don't wanna go down that road because I am an atheist and also, I think it's lazy. That's like asking someone else to do something on your behalf and just assuming that it would be done. I believe in logic - if this is the way the rude man will react when he doesn't get what he wants, one day he is going to mouth off in a similar manner to someone who is also working class with equally poor social skills. That person is going to turn around and say, "what did you say to me?" A fight would ensue and  that rude man will get the crap beaten out of him. Or he might get stabbed, if he keeps behaving like that, then he will get into trouble sooner rather than later. This does not need the involvement of any kind of divine intervention, rather, it will be merely a logical conclusion if you look at the pattern of his behaviour and so I don't need a 'god's' help to get the outcome I want. My logic is based on the fact that there will often be consequences for our actions and that this rude man does not live in a consequence-free world. But what do you think? Do you think there is some merit to the way Ms Tedtalk is preaching forgiveness and embracing everyone in this world for who they are, warts and all? Do you agree that her approach comes across as woefully optimistic and unrealistic? Or do you think that this is what we need right now for us to learn to all get along with each other - it isn't a perfect solution but it is a great approach to get the result we need? Are you given to anger and how do you try to make sure you don't end up always angry with the world like Don? What will be the ideal compromise between the two extremes then? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.