On being a self-righteous bastard

I've got one little post and then I've got a behavior plan, a paper, and an 11th day plan to do (and I still have to take up Carson's blog-tag at Content Done Better).

I just want to take a moment, after thinking about my last 33 years or so, to issue a general apology to the world.

My name is Ben Sutherland. And I am a self-righteous bastard.

When I think, today, about all of the problems that I've had with people who are goddamned sure that they have figured out the correct direction for the world and their clear need to pressure me to observe their wisdom, they all remind me of somebody: me.

When I was young and I would rail on my sisters that they weren't smart enough, on my father that he was an alcoholic (though the truth was that he hadn't drank more than he should in quite a long while since that rant), and on my mom for just trying to get me to vacuum the living room, I was a self-righteous and sometimes scary little bastard.

When I was in junior high school and I would argue with my uncles about their racism and get in their faces about what insensitive, racist assholes they were, I was a self-righteous bastard.

When I was in high school and I would rail about the backward thinking of conservatives and pride myself on being the most liberal member of our Kansas Boys' State delegation, I was a self-righteous bastard.

When I was in college and I would get all worked up about how I couldn't work with my really pretty smart Southern Baptist coach (who had a really excellent Ph.D. idea around narrative paradigm and his idea of a narrative consequence that I totally respect today and who was a pretty good guy when he wasn't getting all worked up, himself) because he was a fundamentalist who thought homosexuality was a sin and who ranted about pornography, I was a self-righteous bastard. When I told on my sister for bringing pot to a visit to see my mom that involved a 10 hour plus carride to Milwaukee because she had been such a bitch to me the entire ride up, I was an especially weasley and shitty self-righteous bastard.

And especially when I was in grad school and ready to save the world and arguing and fighting every day with my equally self-righteous, brainy, and big-hearted girlfriend and my equally self-righteous advisor and radical theorist extraordinaire, I was one self-righteous mother-fuckin' bastard.

For most of my life, I have been a seriously committed, smart, idealistic, level-headed self-righteous bastard who is ashamed of what a high-maintenance little shithead I could be (and probably still am, truth be told).

I'm sorry for that. Because it's meant that I've been full of passion and full of shit all at the same time. And because it has driven family, friends, and everyone up a fucking wall for 33 years and I 'm sorry to be the cause of all of that asspain.

My name is Ben Sutherland. And I am a self-righteous bastard. And as I point one finger at the world, I've four and more where that came from pointing back at me. I hate having folks only focus on my weaknesses, and yet I write for ages about the weaknesses of humanity. I hate people getting lost in only what's wrong with the world and not just appreciating both the world and the people who are committed to righting the wrongs, and I spend a lot of time depreciating both. I hate the idea of people getting heads full of steam of making my life miserable, but the truth is that this is sweet retribution from a world that's been absorbing my self-righteous ranting and rallying for 33 years now.

We had a really great day in Ms. Smith's reading class, today. And when behavior started spinning control in my class, today, I realized that while things were fairly relaxed and laid back in Ms. Smith's class, and while one of my kids and I talked rock and roll and the music world and all the great things to debate and discuss around it, I was something of a self-righteous bastard, today, in class, getting revved up about integers like they were the beginning and ending of my world and the kids' world, which was clear to me was not true about 5 minutes after I had sent out my third student for disrupting class.

This is why most people would rather read Mark Twain or watch Idiocracy than read some scholarly tome. Not just because they find it boring, which is their problem, since there's so much good in those tomes no matter how much energy goes into understanding them. It's because scholars can be some self-righteous bastards, is the truth, for all their liberal thinking. And the same goes for me.

Sometimes for being so smart, I can be kind of stupid, as Frito observes about Max in one of the last scenes of Mike Judge's brilliant little conservative dystopia. Or at least something of a self-righteous sumbitch.

And I don't like being boring. Or self-righteous. And I certainly don't like being a pain in the ass. And I've been all of these much of my life.

And I'm sorry for all of the poor souls who have had to put up with me. I can only hope that I wasn't all bastard or sumbitch.

But then, hope springs eternal.

Love,
Ben