Choices

The other day, I had an interesting conversation on twitter with @nessliddell and @meliharris about the blog I wrote about respect. We discussed how sometimes, it's really hard to separate a person from their actions, and how if you don't separate the two things, it makes it really hard to respect the person.

I think it's really important to respect people.  It's one of those fundamental things that every human deserves.  However, I do not have to like or respect the actions that a person does.  I can respect a rapist while condemning his actions.   I see this similarly to how you should raise children - you can love the child, but not love their actions (like this tweeter whose darling cut off their fringe last night!).  Now, I'm not a parent, nor do I want to be,  but I think the deal with kids is that you're supposed to say 'I love you but I don't like what you've done'.

This same theory holds true for adults - I can respect and even love you as a person, but not like the choices you have made.  We don't have to like all of the choices someone makes.  It's natural to disagree with people.  The thing that makes choices important is that everyone, always, has a choice.  Sometimes, we don't have good choices.  Sometimes, we can be stuck between a rock and a hard place, and we have to just choose the best of two evils.  But most of the time, we have the ability to choose between the good road and the bad road. There's a saying 'Even if you choose not to decide, you have still made a choice.' It is such a true statement.  People who drink drive and kill someone had a choice - they could choose to drink or not.  There was a moment when they were drinking that they could choose to keep drinking and get really drunk, or stop.  They could choose to drive and risk killing someone, or they could choose an alternative mode of transport.  It's not good enough that we say 'oh, but they were drunk, they didn't know what they were doing'.  They weren't always drunk.  There was a point where they made a choice, or in this case, a series of choices that led to the outcome of drink driving.

It's for this reason that I don't think it's okay that people blame their bad choices on their childhood.  There are people who have had horrible, horrible childhoods.  There are some things that, not matter how hard you try, will haunt you forever.  Some things happen to people that are the things of nightmares.  But at some point, they still made a choice.

Take the example of a mother.  As a child, she was terribly abused by her own mother.  She was hit, and kicked and slapped and yelled at, and she grew up hating herself.  There is no way, in 2011, that you can tell me that she thinks that that sort of behaviour is acceptable.  Maybe 50 years ago, but not now.  Maybe at the time when she was growing up, she thought that it was normal because that was her reality, but she also experienced first hand how horrible that made her feel and probably hated every minute of it.

So what's her excuse for abusing her own child?  She knows how it made her feel, and she knows that the abuse causes her own daughter to feel like she did.  It's not good enough to say that abuse is all she knows.  It's very very rare (possibly impossible) to find a person who was abused by every single other person that he or she came into contact with, all the time.  The mother in our example knows that not all people do this, and she knows that's it's not okay.  So why does she make the choice to do it to her own child?

Your bad childhood was not an excuse.  Sure, it might explain some things about you, but at the end of the day, each time you raised your hand to your crying child, you could make the choice to walk away.  Take responsibility for what you do.  It's not good enough to blame your past, or some abuse that you've suffered or some other excuse.

The good news is that most choices won't affect you tomorrow.  Most of the time, you will not be defined by one of the thousands of choices you have to make a day.  But there are some things that may - like the choice to drive drunk or to raise your hand to another person.  My rule about choices is to think first 'will this matter tomorrow'.  If  no, I can go ahead and make my choice.  If the choice is yes, I need to think more about it.  It isn't something that takes hours.  It's a split second process, and one day, it may save your life. Even if you choose not to decide, you have still made a choice.