The Rant

By Ashley Bean Thornton

Do you ever see rants on Facebook or whatever social media you use?   Here’s just the first part of a rant I saw recently…

“I need to rant for just a moment. I’m getting old and I’ve worked hard all my life. I have made my reputation, the good and the bad, I didn’t inherit my job or my income, and I have worked hard to get where I am in life. I have juggled my job, my family, and made many sacrifices up front to secure a life for my family. It wasn’t always easy and still isn’t, but I did it all while maintaining my integrity and my principles. I made mistakes and tried to learn from them. I have friends of every walk of life and if you’re in my circle, it should be understood that I don’t have to remind you of what I’d be willing to do for you.

However….

• • I’m tired of being told that I have to “spread the wealth” to people who don’t have my work ethic. People who have sacrificed nothing and feel entitled to receive everything.
  • I’m tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it themselves.….”

 

This particular rant goes on for a while. It filled up nearly a whole page when I copied and pasted it into my word processor. Here’s a link if you want to read the whole thing: The Original Rant.

I think this rant brings up legitimate concerns.  I also think the way it is written makes it hard to have a good conversation about those concerns.

For example, here are the first two points after the “However” in the rant above:

• “I’m tired of being told that I have to “spread the wealth” to people who don’t have my work ethic. People who have sacrificed nothing and feel entitled to receive everything.
• I’m tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it themselves.….”

What if instead it said something like this?

• I work hard for my money.  I don’t want my taxes to go toward supporting people who I do not think are willing to work as hard as I have.

Both are expressing the same – reasonable to my mind – concern.  But I think the rant is likely to cause arguments. I think the alternate version has a slightly better chance of leading to a productive discussion.

For one thing, the wording of the rant – “I’m tired of being told that…” – implies that the bad thing being discussed is already happening.

The wording of the alternate version – “I don’t want…” – is simply stating the speaker’s preference.  It allows for some useful questions: Is that what you think is happening?  What is making you think that?

Here are some specific phrases in The Rant that I think block communication.

“I’m tired of being told I have to…  –  Nobody likes being “told they have to” do anything, right?  Even little kids are quick to respond to “being told I have to” with a feisty “You’re not the boss of me!”  We don’t like it because we believe we should have some say in what we do.

In fact, we do have some say in the problems being discussed in this rant – we can vote, we can participate.  We don’t always get our way when we vote, because other people are voting too and they may disagree with us, but that is the price of living in a democracy with other people. Tiresome and frustrating for sure…but we do have some say in it and it is not helpful to use wording that makes it sound like we don’t.

“…. by force if necessary…”  – Through our representative system we agree to laws.  Those laws have no meaning unless we enforce them.  At this point in time, we have agreed to tax ourselves and to use some of that money to support people with low incomes.  When people break the laws – for example by not paying their  taxes  —  the government enforces them.  That’s what we pay them to do. When we don’t like it, the appropriate course of action is to try to change the law.  This “by force if necessary” phrase is a needlessly inflammatory and self-victimizing way to characterize a particular law just because we don’t agree with it.

“Sacrifice nothing” and “receive everything…” – “Nothing,” “everything,” “always,” and “never” are usually exaggerations that increase anger needlessly.

“… feel entitled to receive everything.” – We can’t possibly know what “people” – people we have most likely never met — feel.  It just leads to arguments when we make blanket statements about how other people feel when we can’t possibly know.

Here is a phrase in the alternate version that I think helps communication:

“…I do not think…” –  The difference between saying people “are” a certain way and saying “I think” people are a certain way is a big one.  “I think” leaves the door open to gather some more information and perhaps learn to think a different way.

It’s important to use language that opens the door for conversation instead of language that needlessly makes communication more difficult.

It’s also important to remember that most people are not carefully picking out every word they type into Facebook.

A lot of things, like this rant, are just copied, pasted, and shared without much thought.  We might wish people wouldn’t share them, but we can’t do much about that.

What we can do dig for the real, legitimate concern someone is expressing even when the language is not what we like.  We can “hear” the way we wish it were being said instead of getting too stuck on the words actually being used.  We can give each other a little slack – and be glad when people give us some as well.

It’s worth it to try to communicate better because we have some legitimate problems we should be working on, and they are going to be hard enough to figure out without making it harder with the way we talk to each other.