The Man Who Spat on Me
Empathy, Polarities and My Town
Back in 2008 when I was foolishly running for office a man spat on me. I feel pretty naive about what I wrote then, but I’m posting it anyways. Because I feel foolishly naive today too, especially when I look at my Facebook feed and see community members screaming at each other in ALL CAPS and berating each other’s views about things.
Over and over again.
My community is a beautiful place and it’s full of beautiful people, but just like everywhere else in this world, I think we can work a little bit on valuing each other. We don’t have to vilify people who don’t agree with us. We don’t have to turn toward hate over and over again.
We’re smarter than that, I think. Until we aren’t.
This is what I wrote when it was 2008.
Today I went to a house and the man put down his chainsaw ( I kid you not) and I gave him my campaign material and said who I was and that I was running.
He looked at the card and said, “What party are you?”
I said, “My husband has always been a Republican and I’m a Democrat and we tend—”
He stepped up to where he was three inches away from my face and shouted, “Get out of my NAUGHTY WORD driveway you NAUGHTY WORD Democrat. You’ve NAUGHTY WORDED everything up.”
He was really close. His fists were clenched. His face was red. He looked like he was about to hit me.
Then he spat in my face. It went in my nostril. Seriously. I now have the worst case of cooties ever.
Plus, you know, the shakes.
Oh, he also threw my brochure at me. It hit me in the head. I used it to wipe away the spittle.
But mostly I was amazed by the hate. I truly believe that not all Democrats are the same, that not all Republicans or Greens or Libertarians are the same. I also truly believe that to assume all members of a political party have the exact same beliefs with the exact same intentions and the exact same nuances is a bigotry. There’s a lot of bigotry out there. I think this is one, too.
Mostly, though, I’m stunned that a man in my city (pop: 6,000) thinks it’s okay to swear at someone and spit at them just because of their political party.
Plus, one of my biggest wants is for there to be more bipartisanship and cooperation in our state legislature. You know … We all have the same goal, don’t we? To have a strong state, strong communities, good economies and good lives?
I live in a different community now. It’s even smaller actually until the tourists come. And as a reporter and just as a human, I watch people get hurt and broken by other people’s actions and words over and over again. Then so many of those who are hurt hunker into their pain, which is a normal thing to do, and often strike out, too.
But there’s so much good out there, too. People who spend their lives collecting tools and telling their stories. People who save feral cats. People who make community theater. People who put minions on the front of their stores to make children (and themselves) smile. People who sell pink shirts to raise money for cancer, who drive others to treatments, who go coach football or give money to nonprofits, who catch each other’s dogs, who volunteer to put out fires actually putting their lives on the line for others. People who rush down to the shore to help a woman who has fallen. People who give new business people a super cheap place to start up because they know they can’t afford anything else.
Over and over again, people who are vilified for being pro or against cruise ships, pro or against short term rentals, pro or against something with economic implications, are the same people who are also doing massive amounts of good.
There is just so much good in big ways and small in a community. And a lot of those people who do those good things are the same people other people vilify. That vilification, that urge to spit on people that you believe aren’t like you? It’s doesn’t help get things done.
Southern New Hampshire University’s president posted this back in 2018,
“Back in the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” We live in an era where that ability seems to elude many, especially our politicians, who often stake out rigid and unyielding positions, resulting in a kind of polemical paralysis in our political discourse. Oftentimes, leading organizations or teams requires the ability to navigate polarities, to hold both in equal standing and value. It occurs whenever we need to balance two competing imperatives, when a swing too far in either direction means bad things happen.”
When that man learned I was a Democrat (though I was and am more of an Independent), nothing else about me mattered. I was the polar opposite of him. I was the anti-Christ, the devil, and his ex-wife’s mother all rolled into one.
And in a way that’s okay. That’s because I gave him an outlet and I walked away fine.
But in another way it’s really not okay. That’s because he had shut down so much, becomes so entrenched in his beliefs and ideas that he couldn’t see that I’m a pretty mellow human that he might have wanted to be friends with.
There’s this thing called polarity thinking, which sounds bad, but they are kind of coopting the term to make it nice.
The National Association of Independent Schools describes it as this,
“ . . . polarity thinking, which describes situations where there is truth and wisdom on more than one side of an issue. She’s done a lot of polarity mapping work, which involves a shift from thinking about particularly complex problems as challenges to solve to understanding that there are polarities or interdependent tensions to manage. It requires moving from using either/or thinking to both/and thinking to gain the benefits or “upsides” of both poles.”
This week at our town council meeting, one of the councilors tried to do this. He brought some facts to the meeting that didn’t coincide with the dominant thought and feeling of the town. It was brave of him.
A lot of the time, when you do this (especially in politics and in journalism or just posting on social media) people will say that you lack backbone, that you waffle, that you’re milquetoast.
But here’s the thing: Don’t we want people who can understand all sides? Don’t we want people who like facts when they make decisions that can impact an entire community for generations? Don’t we want people who don’t have to vilify others to get their point across? Don’t we want people to be as smart as possible so that they can vote and make the best informed decisions that they can? Don’t we want people to have empathy instead of just spittle?
I know I do, and I know I want to be one of those people no matter how many times I get spat on.