This post is tricky, and just so you know, it won’t have any answers for you.
I had a strange chat with an old friend that I can’t stop thinking about. The friend is really Lou’s friend, but by extension, I’ve known him for a long time and so he’s very important to me, too. We were catching up on speakerphone in the car yesterday and it was really good to hear his voice.
This friend is incredibly talented and probably one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever personally known, and so he’s always had interesting jobs that utilize his genius — and right now is no exception. I’m not going to mention the name of the place where he works, but I will say, if you knew the name, you’d be really impressed. I say this confidently because I know I was impressed. That is until he told me about how difficult and complicated it is to work at this major company.
I suppose most large companies these days have to set up mandatory “sensitivity” and “workplace etiquette” training, but this friend said the number of these trainings they have every month actually makes it difficult for people to get their real work done. And as he continued to unpack the details of these trainings, most of them sounded like “trainings in search of a problem.” I guess I could call them “preventative trainings” if I’m feeling really generous — which I was until my friend mentioned that he got reprimanded because he never submitted his “preferred pronouns” to human resources so they could add those to his business card.
Wait…
Whaaaat?
Preferred pronouns?
Yep.
Turns out, just like it sounds, everyone who works for this massive and truly famous American company carries little cards with their first and last names, corporate title, email address, phone number, AND the pronouns they prefer — in every tense — listed on the face of their business cards!
My friend said the first time he got in trouble for not submitting his pronoun preferences for his business card, he pointed out to HR that his name is classically male, and he felt it should be clear to everyone the pronouns that matched. But that simply isn’t how it works anymore. He was told that some people don’t “identify with seemingly obvious pronouns,” and therefore, nothing in the workplace is obvious anymore.
That seems like an understatement to me!
It’s been ages since I’ve worked in any kind of corporate environment so I really feel like I’m stepping into a reality I know nothing about whatsoever. And I can’t imagine what it would be like to work in human resources at a huge company that has deep pockets it needs to protect from people who can make a case that “his/her/their/its” feelings were hurt or somehow gravely damaged while on the job. That must be unbelievably tricky…
But long after Lou and I wrapped up the call with our friend, I couldn’t stop thinking about his business card — and all of the various trainings he mentioned he has to go to each month — one of which was a “sexual harassment in the workplace” video hosted by a famous taking head with the initials ML. (Dig deep people. Think of a formerly beloved morning show anchor who is the absolute last person who should be hosting a lecture on how to stop sexual harassment on the job… Have you got it? Of course, you do. It was him! And, oh my gosh…I wish that wasn’t true, but it totally is!!)
But all of this has made me wonder…
Have we really gotten so sensitive or…so insensitive that we seriously don’t know how to treat each other anymore?
And are we completely tone-deaf and blind when it comes to the realities swirling all around us?
As shocked as I might seem about all of this, I should probably also mention that I’m currently listening to Ronan Farrow’s new [NERD ALERT] podcast called Catch and Kill — which is all about his specific experiences investigating the Harvey Weinstein case. It is such a well-done podcast —and it doesn’t let anyone off the hook! But as I’ve gotten into each episode I’ve heard so far, there really is this outrageously awful conundrum that happens when power, money, and sex collide, and that messy trifecta is absolutely appalling when you consider how frequently horrible behavior happens in the modern workplace these days.
Oh. And I should probably also mention that I saw the movie, Bombshell, over the holiday break. I pretty much knew what I was going to see in that movie, so there really weren’t any surprises — other than how amazing the make-up team was! It was disorienting to see how much they transformed these actresses into the people they were portraying onscreen! Sheesh…
Anyway.
Clearly, I’ve had a lot of fodder to fuel this post, and as I stated right from the start, I have no answers to my own questions. And, I can’t really find any universal relief to apply to every point of view there is to consider in this world these days. It makes me terribly sad when I hear stories of people who are sex trafficked or abused by someone who has power over him/her/them, yet I can also see that stronger people than me can game that system here and there and get what they want — even if that means that had to suck it up and compromise themselves a little.
Power and influence and prestige and sex and money… All of those things make life so grimy and conflicted, and those dynamics seem to show up everywhere I look.
But sadly, I can see that things have always been this way — we just have more ways to reflect and inspect the ugly underbelly of sin than ever before. We don’t typically call it sin, but I know that’s exactly what it is. Sin has always been in the mix of this world, and it’s always caused deep pain and suffering in our midst. But in my opinion, people have come up with ways to leverage pain and suffering, and so the root of all of that kind of pain gets buried under a false sense of justice or these temporary forms of vindication or labels that garner sympathy using a victim status.
And to me, it seems like culturally, there is this nebulous but ever-present pressure placed on us to see the individual the way the individual wants to be seen — yet sometimes, the individual has lost layers of their own true identity in the mix somewhere along the way… And now, the phrase, “I identify as…” is a very mainstream concept — at least it is out here in Northern California — and, of course at the super fancy place where my good friend works! But where I live, even the bathrooms at a tasting room “are nervous” about offending a tipsy wine drinker who has to pee with the wrong gender modifier on the outside of the door.
All Gender sounds so odd to me, but I realize it’s a much safer identify to use these days…
But the bottom line for me is this: We’re all just humans. And even though humanity is resilient, human beings are still quite fragile. Our spirits wound easily, and sometimes…those wounds never heal. And all of the defenses a human spirit puts up to protect that wound can make every painful thing that happens to that human going forward so layered and tough to reach, and that reality makes me feel so sad.
No one has to hand me a business card that lists the person’s preferred pronouns to see that in our culture, we are currently struggling with a full-blown case of an identity crisis. We’ve stopped identifying as human, and we’ve stopped recognizing how similar we really are, despite our perceived and conflated differences. Inside, we are all fractured and broken by sin, and we’re all in dire need of healing. I can only find that kind of healing and the necessary empathy and grace to treat people with dignity and concern inside of my faith — and so for me, that will always be my response to all of the things that confuse me about this world.
But I can’t help but end this post by turning these thoughts back onto myself. How tone-deaf and blind am I? And how often to I step over other people to get where I’m going? I’m sure the answer must be obvious to you. But as they say…
