I brought two Sharpie® pens to an event this past week; they were different from the usual type in that they were click pens instead of the usual type with caps. I figured that would be ideal because the caps would not get lost, but I got a surprise when I put the pens out and people tried to use them.
Everybody immediately tried to pull the black click mechanism off the pen, and when that didn’t work, figuring their fingers were probably slippery or something, they tried harder to wrench the two apart. That would be when I would say, “that’s a clicker pen,” at which they would stare at me as if I had brought up something entirely new.
I realized something at that moment: our ability to adapt to change has been severely compromised, and I think I may know why. We’re not setting any benchmarks or standards by which we can accept a norm and adapt it, change it or reject it. So the makers of Sharpie® apparently cannot save users the hassle of losing a removable cap by making their pens click instead. Nobody is going to look at the pens and figure it out; it just isn’t right and that’s that. One rejected product can send a company into bankruptcy, but by golly, let’s not go and try to make something better.
This is the same mindset that is affecting our societal norms and throwing our sense of right, wrong and appropriate counter actions into disorder. If we don’t know what to do with people, how do we know what to do with our things? We have no “scale of change,” or point values to assign to our sense of normalcy, so we’re making it up as we go along, and it is causing some crazy things to happen.
We are embracing who we are, for example, as long as some magical majority ruling makes it okay. So maybe some magical rule will make marker pens okay to click someday, but some people may not ever have the right to exist anymore. Our rejection isn’t just not using the product, but throwing away human beings just doesn’t seem like a viable answer.
For example, the Metropolitan Opera continues to produce the works of Richard Wagner, who had a reputation in his lifetime as an anti-Semite, and such behavior is not considered proper today, along with other discriminatory acts. Jump forward to present day to conductor James Levine, who happens to be Jewish and grew to fame as a music master of the most famous operatic pieces, especially Wagner. Because of some sexual misconduct from his past and recently brought to light, he will likely never appear in an orchestra pit again. Nobody is talking about which is worse, but we don’t seem to be assigning the right actions to the wrongdoings.
We have been giving a scarlet letter treatment of sorts to all varieties of men and women such as CBS anchor Charlie Rose and Roseanne (who have dealt with the issues they faced differently and seemingly not to any public satisfaction). Whether the actions were recent or years ago, and whether they owned up to the accusations or not. The past sometimes makes the present stagnant, or it can sometimes change. Do we accept the past, change the future, or always stick to what we know? And how do we deal with perceived wrongs?
In the musical (play and movie) Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye adapted to change and accepted two of his daughters’ decisions to change with the times, but initially he rejected his third daughter for marrying outside the faith. She became, as Kevin O’Leary famously says, dead to him. Later, he relented. Slightly. We knew eventually he would accept her back.
So maybe somebody picks up that pen and examines it for a moment and thinks, Hey, this might work this way. Or not. I haven’t seen the company in dire straights because they put a clicker on a pen.
Sure, we can reject a pen, but we can’t keep on throwing people away because of their sins. Aren’t we supposed to punish the actions to redeem the person? Nathaniel Hawthorne must be whirring around in his grave right now. Shunning is akin to bullying, and we know how that goes in our schools. We should be above that. When somebody prominent goes astray, we need to address it and assign a program of reparation to it. Sure, it’s the prodigal son and the last minute change of heart at the end of every sappy sitcom ever, but rejection gets us nowhere. We still lose pen caps.
So why am I on a rant about this? I just heard that Disney has rejected the director of the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie, James Gunn, from it and future projects because somebody unearthed some provocative social media posts from his youth; though he owned up to how and why he posted the comments, we apparently must be a society free of past sins and ignorant of what it takes to grow a whole person. This from Disney, who produces films about growing and changing and owning up to who we are, who owns the Marvel franchise in which heroes are not perfect but can learn how to be better.
Nobody is perfect (myself included), and I’m certainly not going to stand on a soapbox and say that there are not some horrible people out there who probably do not fall into the “forgive and forget” category, but being stubborn about what we want things to be won’t change what we do or have done or what we can do now. Take a closer look at the pen, and at who we know. The solution is a better one than what we’re doing.
*(The purpose of this post is to prop open the door to discussion, and may not reflect the totality of opinions on the issues out there.)
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