In the past week, I’ve been privy to more chatter about other people than I have all year. Being the week of a holiday, it’s a prime time for social situations and the inevitable cluster of rumor spouting blabbermouths looking for a sense of what is right or wrong about the human condition.
Gossip is a strange human habit, and rarely beneficial. It usually happens when people are in a situation in which they feel the need to talk about topics that disturb them. Even if somebody brings a piece of good news about somebody else to the conversation, the tide soon turns to observations of character foibles and other negative things about folks who are not even present to provide a defense or justification.
I have been the subject of gossip, I’m sure. Who hasn’t? Our vulnerability to gossip starts when we get put into diapers and sometimes doesn’t end, even past the grave. Usually the gossip begins when somebody makes an observation, and the others nod in agreement, even when they don’t agree. The idea of gossip is to unite everybody present against those not present, by airing dirty laundry and speculation that seems to be designed to equalize some sort of societal playing field. Our best athletes, actors and other public figures are the highest form of gossip fodder; the rest of humanity simply doesn’t get into the magazines or television.
Human errors, and our struggles to adapt and grow in a world which alters the rules of life as fast as we can keep up (and faster), outnumber the successes, as William Shakespeare similarly noted in Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar. We tend to bury good people, having taken advantage of their moments of goodness and only remembered the times they didn’t meet our expectations.
One person with whom I was discussing some human missteps by an absent third party, pointed out that sometimes it is better to talk with the topical person about such observations than discuss them behind their backs. On a day like this past Thanksgiving, how could some people’s lives change if somebody would point out to Uncle Ted to his face that his tee-totaling family is disturbed by his annual alcoholic binge after the turkey dinner (especially when he staggers around and wrecks at least one table setting every year)? Or if some unthinking person asks the others nearby if it is okay to take the incoming call causing their cell phone to blast its ringtone, and everybody responds, “let it go to voice,” wouldn’t we be on the path to greater kindness and truth and the chance for true change? We often complain when we gossip, but the way to resolve complaints is to take it to the source of the problem, not confine it to the circle of nodding heads.
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