THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

JOE | 2006-01-20

In reply to my comment response called "Mark" below, Joe writes:

I think you are a person who requires patience and understanding and tolerance from the people you are dealing with. I could be wrong but I suspect that you have had many personal battles in your lifetime. One of the reasons for this would be that you take a stand on various issues. You stand up. You poke your head over the top of the trenchline. Of course, people are going to take a shot at it. People who stand up, especially on issues that the overwhelming majority of people in our country would not even whisper about, can expect a fist in the face now and then. I imagine yours has been pretty well battered. Of course, I could be wrong. It's just a feeling I have. Look what they did to Christ! He told people the truth and they nailed him to a cross! Humanity. Don't ya just love 'em?

With regard to your most recent horsewhipping, perhaps there was a misunderstanding on the part of your cane-wielder. On the other hand, the person may have felt thoroughly justified in tapdancing on your chest. By now I would think you would be used to it. I suspect that you have seen the backs of many heads moving away from you. They don't understand you, Bob. Furthermore, they don't want to understand you. It's too much like work.

I don't think you're thick-skinned, Bob. I think you're very sensitive to criticism. You don't like reproach.

What's not good is people moving in the same direction and fighting with each other at the same time. I've seen a lot of this over the years. People claiming to want a certain goal and fistfighting with each other at the same time. Bodies lying all over like pieces of shrapnel and people wondering why the goal hasn't been achieved.

That people can and will turn on you is something you can expect. I have a story for you about that but I won't include it here. I can just tell you that when that happened to me I dealt with it immediately. I terminated the relationship. But he threw the first punch. I threw the last one.

Comment by joe rorke —

MY REPLY:

Joe, I once worked for a German who dectated letters routinely in French, English and Italian.

At a convention, he did what is hardest, he trasnlated between two foreign languages, French and English. I cannot do that in the languages I am acquianted with.

Frenchmen would sometimes correct his French, which is normally a pain in the keester. But they would tell HIM:

"Your French is so perfect that when you make an error, it stands out."

This was NOT diplomacy. One of hte many reasons people love the French so much is how nasty they are when you make a mistake in their little language.

So this was the highest compliment they could give.

I have a similar problem with your comment. It is all good, solid, sympathetic man-to-man advice, the sort of thing I expect from you.

But you keep throwing in "I could be mistaken..." and that hits me the way my German friend's grammatical errors hit the Frenchman.

I am SO sick of apologies for sincere and well-thought-out opinions!

All this time reading Bob's Blog and you have to keep saying, repeatedly, "I could be wrong...."

No joke!

I just wrote a piece about how the disease of our world is people who think THEIR provincialism is not provincialism, THEIR cowardice is not cowardice, and so forth.

In plain English, most of the world's horrors can be traced to people who cannot believe they can be just plain WRONG.

When you keep saying "I could be wrong" there is the slightest hint in there that I could be inflicted with the same disease.

Dammit, readers, STOP APOLOGIZING!

This is a very important matter to me.

Joe, don't you DARE apologize for doing this!

ALL my commenters do it sometimes and you gave me the chance to raise hell about it that I needed.

I will deal with your excellent analysis in a separate piece above.

COMMENTS (1)

#1 joe rorke | 2006-01-20 21:40

Well, I've read all the pieces and you've so far failed to give me hell. You'll have to work harder at it.

But much more importantly in this therapy session will be your ability to understand what is and what is not an apology. When a man says, "I could be wrong" or "I may be mistaken" with respect to a personal observation, please attempt to understand that this is not an apology. When a man says, "I could be wrong," what he is doing is allowing the possibility for error to exist. This is the opposite of arrogance. An arrogant man makes a statement that excludes the possibility of his being mistaken. He has arrogated unto himself qualities that he does not possess.

Here's a tip to know for sure that someone is apologizing to you. He or she says, "I'm sorry for...etc.," or "please forgive me for.....etc.," You have never heard anything like this from this writer.

Maybe it's different where you come from. Where I come from you don't have to read anything into anything that has been said. As I said to you in an email, Bob, you don't owe me an apology for anything. I don't owe you any apology either. I'm straightforward, you're straightforward, what else is there? As you said in one of your earlier pieces, we tell others about ourselves as we communicate.

I'm also not a diplomat. I know that. I don't try to be diplomatic. It's too much like beating around the bush. I don't even apologize to my wife and she's my whole world. OK, maybe two or three times in our long marriage. But, you'll have to agree, that's not much.