Goody two-shoes
An incident yesterday sent me down memory lane.
I've had Labradors all my life, with the exception of two rescue/adoptee dogs, a tri-coloured Rough Collie called April, and more recently, the beloved Brown Dog, Mira.
April, whom I had as a pet through my teens and early twenties, was a lovable, sweet dog, very prissy and docile, perhaps not overly endowed in brains. Her only encounter with chasing a cat ended with the cat climbing up her face, running along her back, and exiting off her rump before poor April could even wonder what happened.
Mira was initially a very timid, damaged dog, but when she finally did learn to trust us, she developed a character much grander than her size. She had chutzpah like I have never seen.
Labradors are lovely dogs, and while they can be mischievous and silly, and are prone to overexcitement as well as selective deafness, they are also incredibly biddable; indeed, they seem to live by the mantra that they are there to please and love you; that is their mission and they take it relentlessly seriously. They are the epitome of unconditional love and devotion.
Arwen is a monkey, with a playful, talkative, exuberant personality. Soleil is slightly more reserved and mature, and a little more socially awkward, but they are above all good dogs, and they have never been anything remotely resembling defiant.
To this point, yesterday Soleil momentarily forgot herself, as she is sometimes prone to do, and puffed herself up and lunged at the cat for no valid reason, other than because she felt like it. I reprimanded her verbally with one word that I rarely pull out of my arsenal : BAD. Not only did Soleil become immediately contrite, Arwen, who had been nothing more than an innocent bystander, crumpled into a lowered-tail, sad-eyed puddle of upset. Those three simple letters are that potent.
Which brings me back to Mira, who marched to the beat of her own drum. I remember so many interactions with her that basically went this way:
Me: Mira, (insert command verb)
Mira: No
Me: Mi-ra, (repeat command verb)
Mira: Is it the 'N' or the 'O' that you have difficulty with?
Me: Mira, RIGHT NOW
Mira: Eff you.
Me: (goes and gets Mira and walks her through the expected verb action)
Mira: (glowering) Eff you and the horse you rode in on.
I'm smiling as I write this, because even though those frustrating moments happened overandoverandover, it was part of Life with Mira, and I wouldn't have traded it for a second. She was everything that a Labrador is not, and it was as refreshing as it was confounding to navigate the world from that perspective. You never had a true lock on what the outcome would be, not like with a need-to-please Lab. She's been gone now for three and a half years, yet sometimes I think I can hear a bit of Mira's voice echo in Arwen's bark, and Soleil has now taken to doing the manoeuvre we called ''the McClaw'' - that was Mira's trademark move, reaching out with an imperative front paw to haul back the hand that had dared stop scratching her before she was good and satisfied.
The pictures below are just grabs from Facebook, taken 3 years ago almost to the day: Thanksgiving weekend...Mira's last, as it would turn out. Mira hated everything to do with water - rain, puddles, and especially the lake. For whatever reason, on a cool, misty morning down at the marina, Mira fell into the October-cold water off the end of the dock - her worst nightmare I am sure - and had no choice but to swim inelegantly back to shore. The look she gave me when she got land beneath her feet again was priceless.
And that loveable crooked ear.
Network
A couple of weeks ago, I watched and then shared on social media a short (11 minute) TED talk by Elizabeth Lesser about ‘’taking the other side out to lunch’’. Basically she proposed that we all try to at least temporarily abandon our judgemental tendencies and really try to listen to and understand someone whose point of view, background, or political or religious leanings or beliefs were fundamentally different - if not diametrically opposite - of our own.
A large number of my friends on social media are Americans and Britons. Both of these groups have faced and are facing some serious political and cultural upheaval at the moment. Most –but not all – of them, like me, lean toward the liberal end of the spectrum in their characters and choices. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have seen some nasty arguments play out between friends on social media. I’ve seen more than one friend unfriend another over political differences or moral disagreements. I’ve seen more friends than I’d care to imagine, on all parts of the belief spectrum, become ardent evangelists of their chosen point of view, and the consequential, exponential sharings of memes, articles and screeds that intend not only to reinforce said point of view but also refute and refuse all others. Trenches have been dug, and the battle is being waged not with traditional weapons, but with an endless slinging of recycled ‘’facts’’ and distilled ‘’justifications’’ of whatever it is one stands for. He who shouts the loudest (or who posts the best memes) wins.
I don’t like sharing things on social media unless I myself have authored them. This isn’t based in vanity or narcissism; quite the opposite in fact. If I share it, I want and need to take ownership of it. It has to come from me. I do not feel right participating in a recycling of information, and honestly I think sharing is a bit of a cop-out. You read something ready-made that aligns with your perspective, and you click ‘share’ and easy as that, you’ve expressed yourself, without the onerous task of actually having to think or to write.
This ease of sharing seems to go hand-in-hand with a perceived liberation from responsibility for the content of what one shares on social networks. Communication is happening so rapidly, so automatically and so nonchalantly that people seem to lose any sense of ownership for what they are saying. Filters come off, and things get really ugly. There’s a perceived anonymity when one throws things out into the digital communications cloud.
I used to post a daily journal on a small social network whose simple credo was ‘’Be excellent’’. It truly was a lovely place, where photos were praised and favourited and starred and nothing mean or critical was ever said. A little uptopian haven on the interwebs. When the site fell into difficult financial straits, a facebook group was created where members could interact and share information. What was interesting was that as soon as anyone said anything remotely negative about the photo site, the cudgels and pitchforks came out and the negative poster was basically run out of town on a rail. So much for ‘be excellent’. Even more appalling and ironic, the group administrators would carefully expunge any such unseemly threads, because they weren’t in keeping with the group’s ethos. Yet it was the very members of said group who had participated in the pile-on. Welcome to the cutthroat world of social media.
I tried this week to follow Lesser’s advice, and read a couple of articles shared by friends whose beliefs and choices are different to my own. I tried, I really did, to read and listen objectively to these articles, and all I came away with was a sense of incredulity. Perhaps I need to follow Lesser’s instructions to the letter, and speak with someone face to face, rather than reading or listening to what they share. Have them tell me in their own words, not recycled or borrowed ones, what they think and why they think it. And perhaps that’s part of why we have arrived at such an apparent chasm of acrimony. We’re not really talking anymore, or at least not enough, not for ourselves, in our own words. We’re hiding behind masks and keyboards and phones, lobbing borrowed words at one another, and turning deaf ears.
All that we're left with is cacophony.