So yesterday I’m at this big volunteer event at an elementary school – helping some friends who have organized it and I’m passing out wrapped ice cream bars and cones – its fun – who doesn’t like passing out free ice cream? A little girl comes up to me with a partially eaten ice cream held close to her side and asks for another – which I hand to her – it is free we have plenty. I make my way around the school yard which is Bagdhad hot and she returns to me with another little girl in tow who now holds her ice cream down to her side and asks for another and snap – I’m an asshole. I lean in and say – “You already have one – We need to be sure everyone gets one first. Wouldn’t it be terrible if some people didn’t get any ice cream?” I say this with complete awareness that the first girl is standing there with both hands clutching ice cream. So now – even though we have plenty of ice cream – I have shamed both of them. So what piece – what fragment of my psyche was so fragile that it chipped off on the way across the school yard? The one that in a better mood would have smiled and reached back in the box – handing her ice cream drumstick cone number two and the lesson that asking for more - might get you more, - because history isn’t made by well behaved women! They could have talked about it years later – when they were happy and successful businesswomen with functioning families! - about how great was that volunteer day when we painted the school and got two ice creams !
No! Instead I reached inside and served up a healthy dose of shaming. They’ll probably become attached to external validation to disprove the idea that they are bad, greedy little girls... They'll do drugs and have to get a boyfriend who deals – then they’ll join the gang and hang out on corners late at night wearing that defeated blank stare and tight knit tops that don't cover their muffin top bellies - until one day when they are sent to jail because they had to knock over a convenience store to buy formula for the babies they had to fill that hole of longing and need that could once be filled with a simple second ice cream. :)
some shame is good. that's why they call the wise men shamans.
Posted by: Big Bomb | September 19, 2008 at 01:59 PM