Mea Culpa, And Some Backstory

I am not an easy person to know. I’m opinionated, loud-mouthed, stubborn, and egotistical. I have Views and I have Issues, and I’m usually none too shy about jumping down the thick necks of the willfully ignorant to gleefully rip the still-beating hearts out of the stinking filth of their insides. I like to rip the heart out and show it to them, really pressing the glistening, gushing muscle into their shocked faces and let them gasp a few hyperventilated and final deathbreaths while it thumps and squishes in my cold, uncaring hands. I crack a smile and tip my hat, then throw the useless lump of meat to the first stray dog I come across. I just can’t abide stupid people.

Thus, it makes it difficult to know me. The insipid, tiresome rhetoric that vomits forth from the slack-jawed mouths of the ignorant is something I find so vile, so abhorrent, so terrifyingly mundane and nugatory that it rattles the fillings in my mouth and makes my teeth hurt. I try to walk away when I can, but it doesn’t happen very often. When confronted with the sanctimonious and goat-footed certainty of an idiot’s bibblebabble, the hairs on the back of my neck bristle and come to attention, and certain conspiratorial bits of my brain’s pharmacy start cranking out a Herculean overdose of adrenaline. I’ve no doubt that, when my ancestors climbed out of the primordial ooze, shed their gills and fins and scales and stepped up the evolutionary ladder to break off from the missing link and leave Australopithecus alone in his sandbox, crying on the imaginary shoulders of Piltdown Man, they must have skipped right past the “flight” bit of the “fight or flight” education that the rest of the cavemen received. I have no retreating impulse. I lack the ability to back down from unwinnable fights against unbeatable odds, and I’ve no doubt that the sight of me, rabid and foaming at the mouth in a clenched-fist and rage-filled hysteria is not a pretty picture.

I always fight. To me, the simple act of standing your ground and fighting the good fight always counts as a win, regardless of the technical outcome of the situation. Sure, mainly I rumble against stupidity and ignorance, but even that – especially that – is enough to set my heart racing and my blood boiling. However, let it not be said that I globally hate the unintelligent, or the simply misinformed. I don’t have a problem with Person X not being as smart or knowing as much as Person Y – not as long as they know they’re uninformed, and work to remedy their unfortunate situation. In most of my encounters, however, the more severe the ignorance, the more certain the other person is of their worldview’s credulity, and the less likely they are to ever do anything about their stupidity. If part of being wise is understanding that you probably don’t know nearly as much as you think you know, then part of being stupid must involve wrapping an ironclad blanket of certainty around your nugget of internal ignorance, like some hideous monster-child that must be secreted away from the world and hidden behind a deceptive, delusory mask.

Recently, my soon-to-be brother-in-law posted a fairly innocuous status update to his Facebook page that expressed his unhappiness with inattentive parents while sitting in a pediatrician’s waiting room with his newborn baby girl. Naturally, I opened my big mouth and responded with a simple and innocuous reply that advised him to enjoy the last of his judgmental years, as his new baby girl would soon be mobile, and The Rules Would Change. Left at that, everyone would have moved on to other things and never think another thought on it. Of course, things are rarely ever that easy.

Nope, some dunderhead had to come along and take some sort of personal effrontery to the whole affair and begin posting inflammatory diatribes on how he, although young and childless, knows exactly how parents should raise and discipline children, and that he is absolutely certain that his mythical way of parenting imagined children is the rightest, truest, and bestest way of going about the difficult and humbling task of raising a child. I’m sure you can see what sort of dark and terrible road this put us on…

So we had our little comment war, and I tried to get him to simply admit that he couldn’t say with any certainty of what he would or would not do as a parent until he was one. I certainly don’t know anything about the day-to-day life with a newborn, having gone from zero directly to toddler with Trey, without passing Go. Likewise, I can only speculate on the challenges facing parents of children in other stages of development, such as the unruly and mercurial years of an adolescent teenager. However, every point I made zinged right over his head, whizzing by far above his noggin, high up in the upper stratosphere where the crawling, earthbound disaster of his intellect could never hope to reach. Having previously endured the unpleasant experience of running headfirst into the brick wall of absolute certainty that accompanies someone’s willful ignorance, I knew that there would be no end to the battle. And, out of respect for my brother-in-law and the sovereignty of his own Facebook page, I eventually chose to bow out of the conversation, and leave the poor sod to stew in the viscous slime of his own odious juices.

Undaunted, but cowardly, the schmuck then proceeded to go elsewhere on the Internet, into some dark and dingy cave where he thought I could not see. He then went on to recount the whole conversation verbatim (sans the last bits that made him look especially stupid), and somehow wrangled my otherwise nice and affable future brother-in-law into condemning my atrocious behavior by calling my a douche. (Reminder: douche/douchebag is a silly, stupid insult.)

Of course, neither my almost-brother-in-law nor his little troll of a friend ever expected me to come across this unknown forum, but my spy network stretches out far and wide, tendril-like and pervasive, through every nook, every cranny, every highway and byway of the Internet and beyond. It was only a matter of time until the ugliness walked up to me to present itself, and I have to admit that I found his hidden comments disconcerting. I had no idea that I’d so greatly jostled his apple cart, because apart from my very first, very innocent comment about the last of his judgmental days, none of my subsequent (and increasingly hostile) comments were directed at my nearly-brother-in-law. Instead, I was aiming squarely between the doughy, Neanderthal eyes of his imbecilic friend, hoping to carpet bomb his diminutive brain with enough Ideas that one might stick, like some lone and lucky metaphorical sperm out of an ejaculation’s worth of an unlucky few hundred million. However, I neglected to actually tell my brother-in-law that I wasn’t talking about him or how he plans to raise his daughter, which led to the tragic misunderstanding that triggered his (understandable) wrath.

I’ve since explained myself to him, and he’s apologized quite graciously and unnecessarily, and everyone is happy and smiling and ready to move on to the next time I rock the boat in shark-filled waters and anger those around me. I rarely blame anyone for just getting flat-out annoyed with me and my insensitive antics. I know I’m abrasive, and I can be positively relentless when I think I’m right about something, ignoring all social niceties and expected etiquette. Fortunately, I have a great and silly fear of looking stupid, so I rarely go to the mat for anything that I’m not fully informed about. I do my homework, I study my research, and I draw upon my own experiences before I ever open my mouth about anything. Unfortunately, this means that I’m almost always at the advantage over anyone else when one of these debates spontaneously starts, since I’ve had time to prepare and they have not. And, since my short-fused approach to educating the ignorant tends to start more fires and lead to more furious explosions than it does enlightenment or understanding, these sorts of heated debates can only end in tears. I know this, and yet I persist. Perhaps it’s a flaw in my character?

Anyway, I extend to my brother-in-law a twofold olive branch of equal parts Mea Culpa and Don’t Sweat It. Your friend my be a laborious little urchin, but you are a stand-up guy and a bright beacon in this dismal world, where people are loathe to admit wrong doing or to ever say I’m sorry. What we have here is a momentary lapse of character and integrity on both our parts, but we’re all allowed a few errors in judgment when emotions run high and words are not clarified. Know that I think no less of you today than I did yesterday or the day before it – and that, if anything, this whole sordid affair has actually moved you up a few rungs on my secret, nebulous Ladder of Worth.

Your friend, on the other hand, can bite me.

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I'll take care of it.

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