My mother was apparently very concerned about my riding skills when I was a child.
"Get off your high horse," she would say. I assume she was seeing in me what I heard in my own children from time to time with their sighing and eye rolling.
As an adult, I like to take my high horse out and ride it occasionally, just to keep in good shape. I'm at my best with letters of complaint. My guru is Ellen Phillips of Shocked, Appalled, and Dismayed! fame. Her product description suggests the book's an "essential resource for anyone who wants to reach out and scold somebody."
I've used it when the bank didn't credit a payment correctly. And again when the car was totaled and we couldn't come to terms on the value. I've ghost written letters to landlords and done some fairly righteous ranting at a couple of airlines.
The principal is pretty straight forward. Share your information as if you're doing the recipient a favor. After all, you know they'll be as dismayed as you were to hear of your circumstance. Tell them in particular who was helpful as you attempted to solve this problem yourself. Outline the issue as factually and fully as you can.
Tell them what you want. Give them a deadline. It's supposed to be cool, unemotional, factual and compelling. But I'm going to tell you a secret here. I feel that little blur of rage as I channel my complaints into crisp bullets, that slightly red tinge in my peripheral vision that speaks to elevated blood pressure, and the tingle of adrenalin.
My better half smiles when I've decided to take a ride, demurring if requested to make a call of complaint: "but you like it."
If pressed, I have to admit I do. I wear high dudgeon like a perfectly tailored riding habit. It fits me perfectly, so certain am I of the rightness of my cause.
But I certainly don't like seeing it on others.
"Don't take that tone with me, Miss Priss," I would tell my own children. "I'm not having any of that today!"
And when they yelled back that they hated me, which they did in that moment with all their tiny little black hearts, I shrank inside to be at the epicenter of such an emotional earthquake, and more often than I should bloomed back in responding rage. And each time it happened, I knew that time travel existed, because I could see myself almost superimposed over them. I was just about their age yelling something very similar at my mother. It was like wavering in between two timelines, all hazy and a bit purple-red around the edges -- less a hallucination than an echo and a promise.
Or maybe it was just a good imagination and another blood pressure spike.
You see, when we are shocked, appalled, and dismayed, when we have climbed up on our high horses to take them for a nice cantor around the ring, we're not much in the mood to hear the other side.
We snap back in time to hear our mother's voice telling us we are not the center of the universe, that we need to get over ourselves.
So, when you hear David Brooks asserting that now is not the time for a conversation about toxic speech, it rankles. It seems we're all kitted out in armor and lances ready to joust. He wants to unseat me and I him.
And when Senator Kyl of Arizona takes on the Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, I'm sure all of us are taking it a little personally.
And that's important to know about me. It's important to know about Kyl, and Palin and Rush and Beck and maybe even you. Because when stories like this happen, they resonate. And we all get on our riding gear, and maybe our armor. We polish our stories up until they shine. And we practice our formulas for being Shocked, Appalled and Dismayed.
And we're all of us time travelling, hearing the voices of our past calling us on it, and like my kids rolling our eyes and sighing, and like me seeing a little red.
But here's where my mom was right. The world may not revolve around me, but it certainly doesn't revolve around them either. What I feel about this is real. And frankly, I'm shocked and think you should be too at the climate of hatred nurtured by the right. I'm appalled that Palin thinks she can walk back from the targeting imagery, and I'm dismayed that anyone still listens to David Brooks.
And now, I'm getting off. My butt's sore.