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Wednesday, August 04, 2004

practicing what I preach

Don't you hate it when your values are suddenly confronted by reality and you have to actually, you know, abide by them? And it's work?

There's a guy who knows my husband. Exactly how he knows my husband is a kind of convoluted story, but it has its basis in destruction derby so I'll just leave it at that shortened explanation. This guy is the archetypical redneck in so many ways. He has very poorly-cut hair, and very little regard for grammar or personal hygiene. He has more dogs than he has teeth, and more beat-up cars than he has dogs, and he doesn't have a job. He even (I am not making this up) has a mother who looks like the love child, if it were possible, of the Bitter Beer Face woman and Tammy Faye Baker, who has no teeth. And he lives with her. So you can imagine that he is the butt of a lot of local jokes, because small towns aren't all Mayberry; small towns have a sizable "junior high" component to them as well.

And yet the guy is, in keeping with the "redneck" stereotype, a good ol' boy who'd never hurt anyone and just wants to live his life and be friendly to people. Even his mom has her redeeming characteristics. If he were a jerk, I would have less compunction about making fun of him. Because... I really want to make fun of him. Never to his face, but that's no excuse because the "to his face" aspect isn't what bothers me most about people making fun of other people simply because they aren't like everyone else. When I was the one being made fun of, it bothered me just as much that people were doing it behind my back as it did when they did it to my face. So I have to work at it. When he calls (which he does frequently, because he relies heavily on my husband to get him out of last-minute jams with derby cars, or to get his truck fixed where it died by the side of the road), I make myself be friendly and normal with him. I try to curb the tendency to tell my husband that "his new best friend" or "his special buddy" or "Jeff Foxworthy's dream guy" left a message. I make conversation with his mother while T works his mechanical magic on the guy's vehicles, and I keep a straight face. I'm not perfect -- I do slip up, and frankly, the entire first paragraph of this entry is pretty much one big indulgence of the kind of barbed humor I try to avoid regarding these people. For some reason I have no problem slinging it around about businesses who use the wrong form of "its" in a brochure, or other people I know who do stupid things or have screwed-up priorities. I guess making fun of Redneck Guy would just hit a little too close to home -- because I was once the kid with the bad haircut and the decade-old clothes who couldn't walk the school corridors without being insulted by the "cool" kids, and even now I live a rather unconventional life in some ways, and I know exactly how painful it is to be the butt of jokes or to know what kinds of things people might be saying about me as soon as I leave the room. It is a huge exercise in humility for me to see just exactly how hard it is to practice what I preach in this area. Because basically, I thought that I was the nice one, the compassionate one, the one who's bigger than that, but really, all along I was just the one who hadn't had my values tested much yet. And that humble pie tastes really nasty. --------