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When to Speak Up

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-05-19

So, what do you do when you're in public and you see an ugly confrontation develop right in front of you? Do you interject yourself immediately into the action, or do you run away? Do you choose to become a part of the equation and try to lend a voice of moral authority, or do you pretend that you just don't see anything? Maybe you hang back and do nothing, deciding that you'll wait and see if things escalate before doing anything. An interested witness or bystander, with the option open to act if things go sideways. You hope you'll be able to do the right thing if Circumstance taps you on the shoulder.

I have to admit that even hypothetically, these situations make my stomach ice over with anxiety. I'm terrible at confrontations that happen among strangers; I'm always too slow to react, too stunned to think straight. I don't have that quality, whatever it is, that compels the good people of the world to see things with moral clarity and then act decisively, decently. It's a quality that I'm sure good police officers have to have, but then again I've seen some bad ones address a charged situation and make it profoundly worse.

And if race is involved, hoo boy — now the stakes have been raised exponentially. You're potentially going to witness something that could turn very ugly very quickly. It seems to be a very 2018 thing, unfortunately, these sudden blasts of racial confrontation, many of them captured on cell phone video and then played virally to a large and enraged audience. You'd like to be believe that these are isolated, anecdotal occurrences, these internet sensations, and that they don't reflect any kind of national trend, though you're aware that hate crimes in the U.S. have risen steadily since 2016.

But then you'll witness something in person and you know you can no longer pretend that it doesn't exist. And again: What do you do? Just going to live with it, I'm guessing? That's probably the prudent thing to do. Who knows what unpredictable thing somebody will do in extreme provocation? Best to just take cover, and besides, not your circus, not your monkeys. You've got a family, after all, and a life, an you're just buying milk, so. . .

Of course, there is that terrible, unsettled feeling you won't be able to shake later, when you dwell on what you didn't do. You might replay the incident over and over in your mind, thinking about what you could have done differently. Which is a pointless exercise, of course, but one you're going to obsess over for a while. Maybe an unpleasant night for you, which might leach over into the next day. But I'm guessing in two days you'll bounce back and forget the whole damn thing.

In Florida this Spring Break I saw a middle-aged white woman berate the Hispanic owners of a small business because there was a language problem. The owners were charging more than the woman expected for a service, and as they haggled back and forth the woman became exasperated with the miscommunication. "Learn to speak English!" she snapped, and then said some other things that were a bit meaner. I froze, like I always do, and didn't say anything, though the woman's words seemed awful to me. Fortunately, my wife, who was there, didn't freeze. "That's not nice," she said immediately, clearly. Her words didn't quell the situation but they did mute it a bit. There was a pause, and some further back and forth between the two parties. Just having a third party speak up seemed to make a tiny difference. I made a point to remember my wife's response, which was something that every four-year old child says when they see something unpleasant. Hey, that's not nice.
A writer I respect wrote that in 2018, there is a large percentage of Americans who seem to love their hatred more than they love their own lives. It's such a nihilistic, darkly cynical statement that I want to dismiss it out of hand, but I'm afraid I can't. Like so many things in 2018, it seems both preposterous and wholly believable.

Last year I was in line at my local Ace Hardware store, and I was making small talk with the cashier. We talked about traffic and the weather and then out of the blue she said something like, Yes, it's a crazy time right now, and now they're trying to take down our monuments!

I was stunned. Confederate monuments. She was talking about Confederate monuments. I didn't know why anybody would say something like this. And "our" monuments? What the hell? Did the South win the Civil War? And since when was Indiana part of the Confederacy? In that split second I decided that the woman was either racist (worst case scenario) or just sick of political correctness (best case scenario.) Either way I didn't feel comfortable with letting her remarks go unchallenged. A dozen possible responses clicked through my head before I settled on, "Well, that's just the way of the world, isn't it?" with a friendly smile. She smiled back reflexively, and then I changed the subject and when we parted we did that little ping-pong verbal thing: "Have a good day." "You too."

Now this story makes me seem like one cool customer, smoothing the waters effortlessly, but that's not the whole truth. Truth is, I had some pretty ugly responses in my head among those dozen other alternates. And the uglier truth is, I was developing an instant hatred for the woman, on the spot. And let me be clear, I didn't hate her viewpoint, I didn't hate her words. Nope. I hated her. I hated the way she looked, the way she carried herself, the way she talked. Everything.

But — and this "but" is important, for, as Pee Wee Herman once so wisely said, everyone has a big "but" — I didn't keep hating her. After I spoke my benign words, I let the air out of the balloon of my terrible thoughts and when I walked out the door, it was like it never happened. And I knew that if I had given in to my darker impulses at that crucial moment, and spoken something vile, those words would have hung in the air like humidity, clogging everybody's breath. And that's not nice.