anger mingled with compassion

Everyone knows we can't talk to someone who's mind is fixed, but what this post presupposes is...maybe we can?

¹I’m pretty terrible at beginnings (probably middles and endings too), but that first step is always awkward and a little embarrassing. So, in trying to recognize that while also not letting it keep me from starting at all, without a well-defined theme or focus for my Substack and half completed essays strewn across my documents folder, I’ve decided to just start somewhere. And where I’ve decided to start is with a time a stranger was angry with me and, along with his anger, showed me compassion.

But before I get to that story, a more recent experience. Several weeks ago, I attended a family reunion with my mom’s side of the family. Aside from me and one cousin, everyone else ranges from fairly to MAGA-ly right wing. As someone who grew up in the Mormon Church, I’m pretty comfortable navigating these more conservative spaces, but also have lost basically all hope for any sort of common political ground. The day after the reunion, tired and emotionally hungover, I found myself the center of an unexpected and incredibly precarious political discussion. Those present were me, my octogenarian parents and aunts, my cousins in their 60s and my aunt’s husband who is the Vietnam veteran that wears his Vietnam vet hat every day, except for Sundays.

As the family member who has lived abroad, it’s not uncommon for me to kind of become the center of attention at wider family gatherings. As a bit of an attention seeker, I don’t hate this, but usually it’s more like “how many times did you go to the pyramids?” or “Can you still speak Chinese?” (twice and not really), where I can entertain with my stories about dead cats on our street or the time I got invited on a boat ride in the bay of Naples with a Camorra boss. This time, however, people wanted to know about my work as a psychotherapist in Egypt, much of which was with a refugee organization predominately working with refugees from South Sudan. From there we moved into talking about Israel and Palestine, genocide and terrorism. To say I was treading with caution would be an understatement. I was using all my tricks I’ve learned over my nearly four decades on this earth to get a point across in a way that can be heard without escalation. Still, with all of the care and intention, I was so sure that at any moment things would come crashing down. But that time didn’t come. Instead, minds were kind of changed. No one changed their political party or started protesting genocide. What did happen is several people spoke with genuine interest and surprise at the new information provided and recognition that some of the information they had was perhaps not the full story. This might feel like nothing, but it was very much not nothing. Something I was convinced was impossible, was in fact, not.

This triggered a memory from the second worst job I’ve ever had. (The first worst job was and will always go to my five months at First Investors Corporation, a job so bad I have the recurring dream that I’ve died, there is an afterlife, and I have to spend an eternity working at FIC). 18 years ago I was in my last year of undergrad, newly married and living 550 miles from my partner and I needed a job. While my parents were still helping me a ton with school and rent in Annapolis, we now had an additional apartment in Charleston we needed to pay for as well as groceries and the copious amounts of gas spent driving back and forth every other weekend. My first choice of jobs was to work at the Naval Academy library, which before all the book banning and tyranny, was just a library that hired college students from other institutions to shelve books. I was offered a job, but after learning I would have to work some weekend shifts, turned it down because I didn’t want to restrict my limited time with N any further. This sent me looking for something else where I would only have to work during the week for a few hours after class. That something ended up being an assistant at a rental agency. This specific agency had the accurate reputation as slum lords, serving most of my college’s small community with overpriced shitty apartments, snails paced repairs and ruthless collections of fees from security deposits and late rent. What I didn’t know when I got the job was that their primary investments were a collection of even lower quality apartments serving primarily low-income black families in the area. If they were ruthless with college students, they were barbarous with the individuals living in these other properties; 500 dollars for minor infractions like broken blinds, 50% penalties on late rent, and swift evictions were the MO.

I didn’t love working there and all of what I learned made me uncomfortable, but it would be a lie to say I saw the deep injustice of this system. I could see people were getting fucked over on the regular, but also, I kind of took it for granted. Mostly it was just a college job where I used some of these horrible stories to garner welcome sympathy and cred from my friends over how terrible my bosses were and how much it sucked to have to work for “the man”. It’s likely this job would have even faded from memory, were it not for one interaction I had with a tenant shortly before graduation.

I was alone in the office filing and listening to music on my iPod, when a man came in. He was a black man who was renting one of the most run down and poorly kept of our many shoddy properties. After some exchanged pleasantries, including assuming I was the owner’s daughter and me quickly denying that was the case, he told me he was there to ask for an extension on rent. As one with zero authority I couldn’t give or not give anything like that, but I told him honestly that I’d never seen them offer an extension and I was guessing they wouldn’t start now. Then, somewhere in the back of my mind, for reasons I still can’t for the life of me understand, a line from the stupidest of stupid places (Joe Dirt) sprung into my mind and mouth and I said a little offhandedly and innocently ignorantly, “Yeah, it sucks, but you know, this is a business, not a charity.”

And that is, unsurprisingly, where this conversation took a turn. In an instant, the man went from zero to much more than zero. He didn’t yell at me, but he also wasn’t not yelling at me as he told me how dare I say that and did I really think he didn’t know this wasn’t a charity? As I stood there like a deer in headlights, I felt two things: profound confusion and deep shame. I really didn’t know what was going on, but I was also very confident that his reaction was appropriate and I had done something very uncool. I’m sure I stood there frozen for a while, but once I was able to coordinate my thoughts with my mouth again, I apologized. I told him frantically how sorry I was and that I didn’t even know why I said that, but I really didn’t mean it in any way, but clearly it was super rude and I was sorry. The man looked at me, still angry, but also with a rapidly softening demeanor and said “I can see that. It’s okay”. I apologized again, we talked a little longer about nothing, he said he’d be back when the owner returned to talk about his rent and he left.

That was it. With the sharpness of the memory and the fact that I’m writing about it now, it seems that the next line might be something akin to “and my life was never the same”. But that’s not entirely true. This didn’t start me on my journey to understanding the systemic racism and injustices of this country or deconstructing all the white supremacy within. I left this interaction basically the same, except for one thing, that while minuscule, is still pretty miraculous. From the shock of the anger followed by the balm of someone offering me grace, I had a brief but genuine interaction with another person which let me know my structure of understanding was limited. At its root, this exchange made me recognize that there was something incomplete within my system of reality. While it didn’t lead in a straight line to the more enlightened slightly less ignorant person that I am now, it played a role. Something that was before sealed shut due to lack of awareness, widened a little bit, making way for new possibilities.

I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace commencement speech, “This is Water” from 2005:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Such a brilliant and clear image of how the very water we swim in, the air we breathe, the culture we live in, the ideologies we subscribe to, can remain unknown, unconscious and unexamined. The “water” becomes even more challenging to become aware of when those in positions of authority within the dominant system are actively trying to blind people from awareness of its workings as well as even the fleeting possibility of any alternative. What any single person has to fight through and against in order to actually look around them with eyes to see is monumental. It doesn’t make shitty beliefs that harm others excusable, but it can perhaps make way for a bit of compassion for why one might believe the slop they’re being force fed.

So, what am I trying to get at? Be kind? Answer with care when your transphobic uncle snaps back? Maybe that’s part of it, but with an asterisk. Being able to act with compassion is a privileged position. It’s one thing holding space for the ignorance of another whose views hurt people and it’s another to hold space for the same person when you are the one actively getting hurt. I’m not suggesting even for a second anyone being oppressed should be expected to do that. Really all I’m saying is that one time, when I was even more uninformed than I am now, in an interaction where I didn’t deserve it and from someone who certainly didn’t need to give it to me, I was shown compassion. Anger for my offensive actions, but also compassion. The honesty and authenticity of his initial reaction of anger as well as the choice to treat me as someone who was probably doing the best they could with what they knew, offered me an opportunity to grow so that I could learn more and maybe do a little better next time.

While a bit of an idealist, I’m not naïve enough to think that all we need is one little crack to bring down the whole tower of the rising authoritarian hellscape we find ourselves in. However, if we step away from the system and look just at people, whoever we’re talking to in any given moment, I do wonder what could open up in all of us if we could offer an olive branch of compassion. There are not two moral sides to all situations, but there’s only going to be one available side, a really really bad side, if we can’t learn to fucking talk to each other. I suppose this is my invitation to consider times in your past when you were an asshole like I was in my story (unintentionally or intentionally) and along with the cringe of remembering unflattering things about yourself, recognize how you’ve grown since then and maybe offer the possibility of growth to the those who spew canned and ignorant ideologies. Be angry, be fucking furious, but if you are in a position where there’s even a sliver of bandwidth available, maybe offer some compassion for the person underneath. You might be the catalyst for changing someone’s mind.

Recommendations:

Because I’m always wanting to know what people are reading, watching listening too, apropos of nothing I’m going to include some recommendations at the end of each post. Some might be topical based on the essay, but more often than not it will probably just be what I feel like recommending. I’m terrible at writing reviews, but I think my taste is pretty decent and my recommendations are good ones.

Read:

Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. The most “what the hell is water?” example within a story I’ve ever read. A modern classic I think about all the damn time.

Listen:

A Study of Losses by Beirut (2025). I can’t get enough of this album. It’s so beautiful, sad and expertly layered. I’ve listened to it every day at least once since it was released on April 18.

Diabolical Lies: If you’re not already listening to this podcast, start immediately.

References:

Foster Wallace, D. (2025). This is Water. Read entire transcript here.

1. “Eveyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. But what this book presupposes is…maybe he didn’t”. Eli Cash, The Royal Tenenbaums. If it’s been a while or never, watching this might be a nice tribute to the great Gene Hackman.