Sans Fig Leaf
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"Substantially mistaken"
12 April, 2007
Many years ago a friend (let's call him Andrew) who had moved away, returned to Seattle for a couple weeks and was a houseguest at my place. He brought along his new boyfriend. It didn't take long to realize that Andrew's new boyfriend had a few substance abuse problems. About their fourth or fifth day here, when I was alone with Andrew, I tried to ease into a discussion of said problems by pointing out how many beers the boyfriend managed to consume before noon each day.
Andrew practically snarled when he said, "Yeah? Well, you should stop smoking, too!"
Which was completely true (for the record, I have been happily smoke-free for twelve years, now) but entirely irrelevent. Some would argue that the old adage, "He who lives in glass houses should not cast stones" means that one is not allowed to even inquire into a friend's problems when one has similar problems. What it really means is that we shouldn't condemn people for any perceived shortcomings unless we are prepared to have our own shortcomings discussed in a similar fashion.
As it happened, I was perfectly willing to discuss my own habit -- which had never caused me to miss a day of work, had never gotten me fired from a job, had never resulted in my wrapping a car around a telephone pole at high speed, had never made me show up at my boyfriend's place of work in such a state that my boyfriend got fired because of it, had never been used as an excuse to be physically abusive to anyone, and had never caused me to spend a night in jail.
Andrew's boyfriend, on the other hand, had done all those things at one time or another while under the influence of the various "recreational substances" of which he was so fond. Even if my cigarette smoking had ever resulted in problems like that, it would have had no bearing on whether or not Andrew's boyfriend needed help.
However, Andrew clearly didn't want to discuss it. I tried not to talk about it again, but did not always succeed. Over the next few years their situation went from bad to worse. At a later point I was telling my mother, who was casually acquainted with Andrew, about his troubles when another relative present interrupted to ask if I still drank.
Given that I routinely go months at a time without touching alcohol, I wasn't sure what the point was, but I said that yes, on occasion I do drink.
"If you don't want to wind up like your friend, you better stop now while there's still time," she said.
Which was hardly true, and again entirely irrelevent.
But it struck me that my relative was making a similar mistake in reasoning as Andrew. My relative's alcohol issues are all predicated on the assumption that people are powerless to resist the pernicious habit-forming properties of alcohol. Andrew's deflection of the issue was predicated on the assumption that all uses of any habit-forming substance were equivalent. Both were blaming the substance instead of the user.
In Andrew's case he was also blaming the messenger--which is understandable, if not terribly productive. None of us like to be criticized, and it is exponentially more annoying when we are criticized by someone we perceive to be a hypocrit. But whether the person bringing something to our attenion is a hypocrit or not has no bearing on the underlying issue. Is there a problem, or isn't there?
Whether or not there are other problems with the same person, relationship, or family, the fact that we can't solve all them with one simple fix doesn't mean that we shouldn't tackle any of the problems. This is true both for personal problems and societal ones. Grumbling that solving X will do nothing about Y or Z is just making excuses.
And it's a pretty poor excuse, at that.
--Don Wood
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