Sans Fig Leaf
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"Appropriate response"
5 October, 2006
One time my hubby was telling the story of a particularly unpleasant plane trip we had been on. It seemed that nearly every passenger on the plane other than us had brought more than twice as much carry-on luggage as the supposed maximum. It took so long to get stuff stowed, and for the crew to convince some people to let some of the stuff go into the checked luggage, that the flight was delayed.
One of the people listening to the story suddenly interrupted to proclaim, "There is really no reason you should ever carry on any luggage. Airlines hardly ever lose suitcases any more, and it's so much easier to just check everything and walk on unencumbered."
Several of us pointed out that there are plenty of situations where someone needs to have access to some things that won't necessarily fit easily into pockets (medication for chronic conditions that must be taken on a schedule, for example). Even if the flight is scheduled to be a short one, sometimes delays force you to sit on the tarmac in the plane for hours.
"You can't fit a bottle of pills in your pocket?"
So then we explained how some medical conditions require more than a bottle of pills--for example a diabetic may have blood sugar testing equipment. Or someone just may be on a large number of medications for one reason or another.
"People like that shouldn't be travelling by plane."
Which caused an even bigger uproar. The funny part was that he couldn't understand why people were so upset. All he had done was stated a couple of personal opinions, after all.
Life is seldom that simple. As a couple of my friends occasionally have to remind me, how we say something is as important as what we say. If this guy had simply said, "I never carry on any luggage," most of us wouldn't have felt a strong urge to correct him. Which was mildly ironic: we were trying get him to admit that maybe his way of looking at things wasn't the only valid viewpoint, but on one level most of us were thinking that our viewpoint was the correct one, and by implication, his was not.
Probably what we all should have done was just ignore the original declaration, because this guy was always making sweeping statements about how other people should do things. The statements were usually phrased in pompous tones with the explicit assertion that any other way of looking at the problem was so wrong as to be laughable.
But those past outbursts made it more difficult to ignore him, not easier. If someone has made us feel defensive before, it doesn't take much to get us feeling that way again. So we may overreact to his new statements--which isn't to say that the new statements don't deserve a reaction, just that when we have a history with someone, we're less likely to respond proportionately to the offense.
In an ideal world, we would hope that our responses to even the most offensive behavior will always be calm and reasonable. I'm not completely sure that's always appropriate. For example, in a criminal justice setting, we expect a repeat offender to receive a harsher sentence than the person who has never behaved that way before.
Sometimes, an overreaction is actually just right.
--Miss Piggy
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