Stop the Mean!

A couple days ago, I remembered a quote I remember seeing somewhere. “A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.”

I seriously always hated the movie “Mean Girls.” I thought when I saw it how awful the girls are, and how the meanness was a little bit over the top. No one is really that cruel, right? Well, it happens, and not just in high school either. I know plenty of bullies and mean girls now. But when you’re in high school, and the opinions of your friends and peers means everything, it is a much more tragic thing to experience.

I have been working as an essay grader for an online high school. Every day I read stories from kids who were removed from the public school system to literally escape from the cruelty of their peers. It’s heartbreaking. The current assignment I’m working on involves students writing about a time they made an unexpected friend. Many of these kids write about their “best friends.” These are, in a lot of cases, not friends in the sense that we all think of them. In a lot of cases, a “best friend” might be the only one to talk to them. A “best friend” to some of these kids might be a faculty member at school who stood up for them. A “best friend” in some cases could be someone who lends a listening ear. Either way, these friends saved the life of someone just by being nice. 

Sure, at first read, it seems like it might be an exaggeration. Then again, maybe not. Think back to your high school days. You can probably think of at least one person who likely walked the hallways, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, trying to avoid people. We might peg them as weird, or loners, or apathetic. However, maybe it wouldn’t be much of a stretch if we were to peg them as victims.

I can’t help but look back now and wish that I had reached out to some of these people. I can see their faces, their expressions that I thought were blank stares of ambivalence now showing what they really probably were–wordless cries for help, for some basic human kindness.

I think I would like the opportunity to go back in time and ask them to sit with our group at lunch. They weren’t involved in groups at school. They didn’t go to dances. I didn’t have them sign my yearbook. Not the cruelest thing in the world, but not the nicest either. I didn’t give them a second thought in high school, and until now, I hadn’t given them a second thought in over ten years.

So I guess all I’m trying to say is high school may have been a pretty good time for a lot of us. Then again, for a lot of us, it might have been a living hell. I’m seeing that a lot more now through my work. And if all the meanness, all the gossip and backbiting and your basic run-of-the-mill cruelty, had ended back in high school, we might be okay. But unfortunately, we all know about meanness all too well, no matter how old we get, no matter how much we learn and how much we should know better.

I guess another thing that I’m trying to say is that I’m grateful. I haven’t always been the best person or nicest. I made a lot of mean prank calls when I was a teen. I gossip a lot more than I’m supposed to. But as I slowly dissociate myself from mean girls, I’m finding it’s a lot easier to stop feeding the fire. Stopping gossip, backbiting and meanness is a lot easier when you have the friends I do.

There is a quote that is generally attributed to Plato that I’ve always thought was worth remembering. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. I remember being in high school and looking enviously at the popular kids and pitying the out-crowd. As it turns out, both groups had their own sets of problems.

Nobody is exempt from problems. But nobody is exempt from being kind either. Everyone is going through something. Perhaps we would be less prone to jump all over someone’s case for saying something we don’t like, or for acting in a certain way, if we were to think, even for just ten seconds of our time, that they might be going through something too.

Be nice. Even to the waiter. If not just to be a good person, at least because he can easily pee in your soup.

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