Talk that diminishes all of us

The woman was upset.
No, that word’s not strong enough. She was distraught.
What do you do, she was asking. What do you do in the face of a lie?
Or, to be more precise in her case, what do you do in the face of a campaign of lies?
The woman shook her head. Her anger about the situation rose.
And, ironically, when her anger rose, it was possible to understand why she and her family had been targeted in the first place.
To say she was a strong personality would be an understatement. This was no shrinking violet.  
Meanwhile, the family was just as successful as it was hard-working.
Envy and small-mindedness would make them targets.
Your neighbor is successful? It can’t be because he’s smarter and works harder than you do. It must be because he’s shaved some corner or has some insider advantage.
To admit otherwise would be to admit one’s own shortcomings.
So, some folks become targets.
But this had become particularly nasty.
Neighbors had spread rumors of multiple bankruptcies at the family farm.
There were no bankruptcies.
Gossips had claimed that a lawsuit against local government had bankrolled the family business. Not true.
But the woman still felt it necessary to keep the legal documents on hand at all times to squelch the toxic babbling when she encountered it.
You want to see the insurance settlement paperwork? She’ll produce it at a moment’s notice.
Should that be necessary? Of course not.
Yet it was happening, and the woman across from me was torn between wanting to aggressively fight the lies with the truth and just walking away, doing her best to ignore it, and trusting that the truth will come out eventually.
That’s a tough call, and I wasn’t much help when it came to advice.
Is Jay County worse about this sort of poisonous chattering than other places?
Nope.
We’re just as bad as every place else, though that’s nothing to be proud of.
I’ll never forget driving into Wiscassett, Maine, years ago. The official Chamber of Commerce greeting sign billed the town as “the prettiest village in Maine.”
But when we drove through one year, someone had eliminated an “r” so the sign read “the pettiest village in Maine.”
Clearly, pettiness, gossip, and envy know no boundaries.
But that’s small comfort when you encounter it first-hand.
There are, fortunately, two remedies:
•Don’t believe all the nonsense you hear.
•And don’t repeat it to others.
Human lives are involved. Those names bantered about so venomously are, after all, attached to real, live people.
And that’s always worth remembering.
This sort of crap diminishes us all.[[In-content Ad]]