Staying Cordial

I find myself slipping into a combative disposition.  As much effort as I put into following Micah's guidance in Haftarah Balak, recited around the world, deferring to rules, defaulting to kindness, and humility in every action seems different from how my frontal lobes and amygdala were wired together.  Irritations and annoyances occur with enough regularity, that at the close of 2023 I took Arthur Brooks' advice and started keeping a daily log of something that annoyed me each day.  Rarely I have to grope for an event, but most days something pushed my buttons.  Or somebody pushed my buttons.  His recommendation also included a revisit at one month and six months.  As he predicted, none of the daily entries proved enduring.

A sense of fairness and what is just is also probably ingrained into our individual cognitive functions.  These are easy to violate.  People pushing ahead of the line as a personal experience becomes people sneaking across the southern USA border while others wait their turn as a communal experience.  Consensus to stop it is pretty widely accepted.  Cruelty as a technique is probably not what Micah had in mind but it registers as just response to a major infraction in many minds.

My Mad At list has permanent and transient entries.  My Bank, maybe The Banks.  My Shul expands to The Machers.  Expectedly subpar encounters at the grocery checkout expands to all companies that hire people I really would prefer not to cope with.  Specific encounters generalize too easily.  We live in an era of mistrust, much of it deserved.  Unfortunately, we are not left with a good way of separating out what should be embraced from what should be dispatched.

My medical community probably had the right idea when it established universal precautions early into the AIDS era.  Just put on the protective gear.  Assume every encounter is a risk.  It is easier to remain hospitable when there is no threat, or at least its potential has been contained.

Or keep the combative signals, no matter how appropriate the hormonal-neural connections find them, without a public expression.  Follow the rules myself, be kind, and don't self-promote.  Part 1 of most Honor Systems.  Be Good.  Widely implemented.  Part 2 is harder.  Turn in the Cheaters.  Not as well implemented, but essential to a functioning Honor System.  I don't know how well Micah would have done with that.  

Limits to My Tolerance

Two events of note.  I returned to the public library an interlibrary loan book that I finished a few days ago, Jewish in America by Richard Rubin, a professor emeritus from Swarthmore.  It was in my possession about four weeks, read at a paced level.  It gets a favorable review from me.  The second event was a decision to snooze my most prolific posting FB contact.  She posts a few times a day, not so much as to create screen clutter.  However, the comments have drifted across the line from racially insensitive to more overtly racist, the type you would not offer in a workplace.  

Related events?  Indeed.  Prof. Rubin's book describes the Americanization of the Jewish population into a distinctly identifiable culture.  We take advantage of our political equality, if not our social equality, resulting in educational attainments that become either high income or wealth.  With appreciation for this largesse, we seem culturally highly tolerant of everyone else, if not overtly helpful.  In exchange for a live and let live approach to ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, physical capacity, and the like, there must also be a rebuff when this gets threatened.  America can be an honor system in a way, one with two parts.  Part 1: don't transgress goes pretty well.  When there are anti-Semitic, racial, or other events, the response in favor of the victims is uniformly overwhelming.  Part 2 in any honor system usually fails: don't tolerate improper conduct from anyone else.  Live and let live has a limit.  I snoozed my FB contact for 30 days.