Editorial 4.3, April//May 2002, by Deirdre Helfferich Walking On Water "So, flouride is a nonissue, hm?" said my neighbor, local environmentalist and occasional guest columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, to me the other day as we accompanied each other down Stone Road, he on his bicycle and I on my feet. This question was the (to me) unpleasant beginning to what turned out to be an interesting discussion about the general rise in or awareness of background pollutants in the national waters. He had given me copies of two articles on flouride’s possible ill effects a couple of weeks prior, wanting me to produce an article for the Ester Republic. This was in light of the recent news that Water Wagon’s water supplier, College Utilities, might potentially purchase water from Golden Heart Utilities—water that would be flouridated. There had been a small flap in the News-Miner about flouride, and some people had expressed concern about its non-tooth-strengthening—and possibly harmful—properties. Flouride, however, was not really the issue that interested me, nor was it the issue that struck me most forcibly in our conversation that day. After a grim, but, as I mentioned above, interesting discussion on the nasty side effects of things like caffeine and flouride on people and young fish, my neighbor and I parted on Village Road, near the post office. It was a gorgeous sunny day, spring in the air, and he said as he moved off, "But it’s hard to think of things like that on a day like this." I felt, briefly, like my day had been ruined, but the sunshine prevailed—eventually. I walked on alone to the post office, thinking about the beginning, the middle, and the end of our conversation, and how the issues that stood out for me were probably not the ones that stood out for my neighbor. His question at the beginning of the conversation had poked me in both my professional and personal pride—and unecessarily. Flouride, it is true, is not a big issue for me—but water quality is. Whether flouride constitutes a pollutant is up for question in many people’s minds (the articles he gave me were somewhat disturbing, for several reasons)—but it does help teeth, and that is why it is in the water from Golden Heart Utilities. What was more important to me at the moment was my sense of fair play. Squelching important news is not playing fair with the readers. Nor is inflaming them with uninformed opinion or incomplete information. Neither, thought I somewhat pettily, is it fair that we need to worry about crud in our environment. But what was central in my mind was the interaction between the two of us, and how this single factor, human interaction, was really the central issue in any discussion about, well, anything. If the interaction is flawed, the subject is made irrelevant. How one converses is far more important than what one converses about. The beginning of the conversation was bumpy: I had been talking to myself (thinking about unpleasantnesses in a previous job) and so was embarrassed and not in the best of moods when my neighbor came up on his bike and said hello. He wasn’t what I considered polite in his rather rhetorical question about the flouride article, and I reacted defensively to it, mostly because I had wanted to include an article on the subject but also because I was still unsettled by being viewed in public talking to myself. (I have no idea if he actually heard me doing this, but as I suspect myself of being somewhat nutty—nuts are the kind of people who talk to themselves in public—I was off my stride.) Then we proceeded to have our calm and pleasant conversation about absolutely vile things. The how was better, but now the what was catching up with me. Finally, I was left by myself to face these ghastly thoughts alone while the guy who brought up the subject blithely went off for a bike ride in the sunshine. The cad! So I got annoyed. And on my high horse. Which didn’t solve anything—sitting on that proverbial height removes one from the nitty gritty of personal responsibility, and when two people talk together, it is the responsibility of both to treat each other honorably and with fairness—and that can be hard. One of the reasons People With A Cause are so often despised, even if the cause is good and true, is that they can lose their ability to be humane to those who do not agree with them. Worse, such a person can lose their sense of humor or their sense of perspective, and start seeing the world in black and white, Us and Them. This tendency, however, is not reserved for fanatics—it springs up in any interaction where even the hint of conflict whispers. So it becomes easy to write people off, even if for a moment, and attack them without questioning one’s assumptions or behavior. Conversely, it is also easy to react to people as if they are attacking, and thus precipitate or escalate a conflict. To check these urges, to treat people courteously and with respect, means to recognize their humanity and therefore their common cause with you. They say that courtesy is that essential of civilization that keeps people from killing one another. I have to say I agree, with the proviso that a good joke is what makes not killing one another worth it. We’ve gotta be able to laugh at ourselves. None of us walk on water, over anything. We’re all down here in the mud together. The least we can do is avoid slinging it at each other. | ||
 | | |
