And I'm not just talking about the 8 year olds who are dressed like street walkers and the 11 year olds putting on pouty faces and over-the-shoulder glances for their Facebook profile pictures. Or the boys who walk around with their underwear hanging out of their pants, though certainly I could do without any of those things.
I'm thinking about couples who "work out" their differences on competing Facebook posts. It is SO destructive to fight in public like that, even if you're just sending non-directed complaints into the web-o-sphere. Our mothers used to talk about "not airing your dirty laundry in public." Today we not only air it, we auction it off to the highest bidder.
I'm thinking about the hubris (self-destructive pride) that means we undervalue the pain of others and overemphasize our own. As frightening and as wrong as we may feel the attacks on unions in Wisconsin may be it is NOT the equivalent of protestors being strafed by aircraft in Libya. As restrictive and perhaps unfair as the regulations for NFL players may be they CERTAINLY are not the modern equivalent to slavery -- not in a business where you can make half a million dollars a year without ever playing a single game as a rookie second- or third-string player.
Nobody wants to be humiliated. Nobody. And humiliation is not the same thing as humility, which is really about an honest and truthful evaluation of both our weaknesses and our strengths, our gifts and our challenges. Modesty is about recognizing that the universe does not resolve around us and that some problems are un-resolvable and some may require a little effort and responsibility on our part to resolve. It is about admitting that we are not perfect and we can't expect anyone else to be perfect. It's about recognizing that our solutions might have been better, our complaints might not be as valid (or of as high a priority) as we assume, and that, sometimes that's just the way life is and it's okay.
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