This week’s post is Part One of a three-part series that will continue over the coming weeks. Stay tuned as we continue this conversation about the people we’ve killed lately.
If that imagined mini-trial at the pearly gates is real, mine will surely include the following exchange:
- Saint Peter (well into the interrogation): And did you love your neighbor as yourself?
- Lee: Yes. I tried, anyway.
- SP: Your permanent record says you spent a lot of time with those women in prison.
- L: Yes, by the grace of God, I loved them a lot.
- SP: You did pretty well with your family.
- L: God gave me a great family.
- SP: But what about the people you killed?
- L: Wha…? Killed? I never killed anyone!
- SP: You may not have realized it! But it says right here: ‘Left bodies in the wake of every customer service call. HP Printer problems. Sprint. US Cellular. Dish Netw… ‘ Do you want me to go on?
“My name is Lee and I have a problem.” When I am on the phone with “customer service,” my kind and generous self—the one I like to think is really me— retreats and my harsh, lawyerly self comes out swinging. I descend upon that poor, overworked, underpaid phone representative with a “crap ton” (as my boys put it) of righteous indignation. My frustration and impatience saturate every bit of that interaction.
I’ve been aware of this…um…character flaw—yeah, I’ll call it that—for many years. But I didn’t think of it as murder until I heard the venerable Parker Palmer name it that way in his Undivided Life audio recording. He was talking about his Quaker ethos of nonviolence, which led him to realize that violence isn’t always physical. Violence can come even in silence, Palmer said, such as when I am “dismissive of another person who threatens my reality too much.” We kill such persons “not with a gas chamber or a bullet, but with a phrase of dismissal or diminution, to render you irrelevant to my life. And I think that’s a fair definition of what it means to kill somebody off.”
Ouch.
I don’t have to be nice to customer service reps, because they truly are irrelevant to my life, once it becomes clear that they can’t (won’t!) do what I’m demanding of them, or fix the problem that has prompted my call in the first place. My best self doesn’t have to show up because they don’t know me, beyond a name on a computer screen that they’ll forget as soon as I hang up. They don’t know I’m a clergy person; I have no pastoral identity to uphold with them. I could bump into that person on the street and neither of us would know it. There is great freedom in anonymity.
And great carelessness. To the point that Parker Palmer can call it “killing somebody off.”
Have you killed anyone lately?
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