For something like a year and a half I have been posting my sermons on this blog. Mostly they are meditations on the things I see around me: essays on not being a dick. And I want to say right up front, that I believe that every time each one of us refrains from being a dick, the world is a better place.
And although the world might not improve drastically because you don’t cut in front of someone on the freeway, I believe that you are yourself changed each time you don’t get angry, each time you refrain from saying something hurtful, each time you make a point of putting someone else first. I certainly believe that whenever you treat someone the way you would like to be treated, you are better for it. Certainly their life is improved, but so is yours, because being aware of how your actions impact others makes you happier. It makes your life more pleasant.
Whenever you stop yourself from being a dick, you are being what the Buddhists call mindful. Mindfulness is the awareness of the world around you, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. What this gives you, the non-dick, is the ability to live in the precious moment that if unnoticed, will speed past, leaving you the poorer for a bit of your life you threw away.
“Live in the now, dude!” If you take a second to ask yourself, “What would a dick do?” and then decide not to do that, you are slowing your life down for that second. In that second you are mindful, and the minute that follows – the minute when you don’t drop your garbage by the side of the road, when you don’t ignore a colleague just because she is a woman, when you don’t cut in front in traffic, that next minute is a moment of peace for you. A moment of happiness.
I honestly believe that’s all we have to do to start making all of our lives better.
But it’s not all that we can do, and I want to talk a little about that right now.
The guy who throws his half-empty McDonald’s shake into my front yard is a dick.
The girl who takes hers home and puts it in the garbage is not a dick.
And the person who sees the garbage by the side of the road and picks it up, is an anti-dick.
The guy who stops his friend from interrupting their female colleague and says, “Hang on, let her finish,” isn’t doing much, but he is being an anti-dick. Because the interrupter is being a dick.
In our apartment building there is a rubbish room on every floor for the garbage and for storing the recycle for pick up. It’s only a small room, and what with pizza delivery, the Amazon boxes, the flat pack furniture, and the paper grocery bags full of cereal boxes, it gets filled up with recycle really fast. By Friday evening it’s hard to even get near the garbage chute. I love the guys who come Monday morning to clear it all out, believe me. Who I don’t love are the neighbors who ignore the instructions to break down cardboard boxes and just dump them in front of the biodegradable bin. I mean, come on now!
So yeah, the neighbor who leaves his boxes piled up? Dick.
The neighbor who flattens his boxes and stuffs them up against the wall behind the bin? Not a dick.
The guy who takes his box knife with him and flattens other people’s boxes? Anti-dick. (That would be me, by the way.)
And yes, this is really trivial. But our days are filled up with the trivial, and doing something about the trivial helps, too. If flattening boxes is one way to make the world just a little better to be in, it’s worth doing. It’s easy. All it takes is mindfulness, a little time, and a box knife.
Moving the abandoned shopping cart out of the parking place and putting it into the collection area is trivial. Letting the person with one loaf of bread go in front of you at the check out is trivial. Goodness knows, just holding the door open for someone whose arms are full is trivial, but I’ve been glad of it. And I’ll bet there are a lot of you that have been glad of a trivial act of kindness.
A trivial act of kindness is remarkably easy. Less easy is standing up to intervene when some dick is insulting a counter worker because he thinks she’s too slow, but we need to do that. Even harder, perhaps, is standing up when our political leaders seem to take misogyny in younger men as some kind of god-given right and attack the women who complain about it.
It seems to me that whenever a man says he was sexually assaulted as a boy, it is taken as a matter of fact, but when a woman finds the courage to do the same thing, she is doubted, insulted, threatened, and shunned. Any man who makes that kind of a judgment, without any information to go on, is a dick. And if he’s a person in a position of power, he’s a king-dick. Holding yourself or your group to a lower standard than you demand for others is the exact opposite of the Golden Rule. Legally, morally, spiritually, socially, individually, it is toxic. Poisonous.
And the only anti-toxin we have is to be an anti-dick. Because that social poison is killing us.
The good we do doesn’t have to be a big deal. Just make good someone else’s bit of dickishness. Maybe we should be like the anti-dick organizations that “adopt” a stretch of I-5 and clear up the mess. Just chose a piece of your life where you won’t let people drop their physical, emotional, political, or sexist garbage. Maybe at work. Maybe at the roadside. Maybe at your local Starbucks. Maybe just in the recycle room.
Be an anti-dick when you can.
But at least, you know, in the first place…
Don’t be a dick.