The Art of Being Human

   My mom used to say, “It’s all fine and good until you get hurt.” She was usually referring to some hair brained scheme my brothers and I dreamed up.  She might just as well been talking about gossip though .  It’s all fine and good until someone gets hurt and someone always gets hurt.  If you’re saying something behind someone’s back it’s gossip. I don’t care what your intention is. It’s mean. It’s bitchy. It’s two faced. So, why do we do it? For one thing gossip is what passes for entertainment these days. Just turn on any entertainment show and even a few news shows for that matter.  Gossip sells. That’s the bottom line.  It feels justifiable to talk about someone we don’t like and gossiping makes it easy to dislike people. There’s a vicious cycle for you.  We whisper innuendo about people we barely know to make ourselves look better. Snide half truths are exploited to take people down a peg when we think they’ve gotten too full of themselve...

This week I was the target of misplaced gossip that was as untrue as it was unkind and completely understandable.  This is life after all.  People who don’t know me well assumed something about me and instead of coming to me they attacked me for it. How I dressed, how I looked, who my friends were, everything about me was fodder for innuendo and speculation, all of it negative of course.    You may have read the story of the mother who stopped at a traffic light and got out and opened the back door of her car. It didn’t take long for the drivers behind her to assume the worst about her character and lay on their horns like they were getting paid for every note they added to the cacophony.  It wasn’t until later that they found out that the woman’s young daughter was in backseat choking. Each of those drivers made a choice to interpret what happened based on how it affected them when it in fact had nothing to do with them, most of the time it doesn’t.  We’r...