Friend or Foe

“An ancient proverb tells us "Iron sharpens iron and one man sharpens another." If you are being "dulled" by your friends, why not try a new tact: challenge them and ask them to challenge you. Ask yourself these questions: are my friends better people because of my influence? Do they make me a better person?” I read this in Joe Plemon’s column in The Southern, on September 17, 2009. I started to think about my friends and which ones challenged me to be a better person. As I thought more about them, I realized that I had a responsibility to them too. And I think I come up short in that regard. It’s just so much easier to let it pass and not make an issue of it. What is the “it” you might be asking now? Well it’s the ugly comment that we might make about other people. You know, the talking behind their backs that almost everyone does from time to time. Even the occasional distortion that we hear designed to tarnish another’s reputation. Every time I hear a friend criticizing another friend, who is not present, I think to myself, “ I should challenge this person”. But most of the time I don’t. Sometimes I join in the critique. In the back of my mind I know that I will be the topic of a similar critique when I’m not present the next time. And this is how it continues. Ultimately, we all suffer from it. W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous sociologist, is credited for his metaphor of the crap pot. He describes it this way; when a crab tries to climb out, the other crabs pull it back down into the pot. This way, no crab ever makes it out. So it seems to be a natural phenomenon, sad to say. But it doesn’t need to be this way. That is, if we really want to be a true friend. I’m afraid most of us settle for being just a friend – not necessarily a true friend. It’s the easy way out. Challenging our friends to be better people often sounds like we are trying to be superior. Most of us don’t want to sound that way. So we keep our thoughts to ourselves And then again who wants to argue with friends. Most of the time we are friends because we enjoy each other’s company. Challenging them is not an enjoyable process. Especially because a challenge usually gets a strong defensive reaction. I think this does more damage in small towns. Although I was born and raised here, I’ve lived in or around big cities most of my life. Things are a bit different there because hardly anyone knows the folks three houses down the street. People tend to develop their own little circle of personal friends almost in defense of being swallowed up in the masses. So when they don’t challenge a friend to be better, it’s never really known by anyone outside of their circle. But in small towns it works like a cancer that slowly consumes its host. In small towns, the cover of anonymity is pulled back. Nothing spreads faster than a good morsel of gossip. And it usually involves a juicy bit of negative news about a member of the community. It would seem to me that if that gossip is based on a real mistake or an act of bad judgment, it would be so much more useful to challenge the offender to be a better person. That act might raise the quality of the person and the whole community. I’ve been accused of being an idealist. I confess. I am. I don’t even meet my own standards, so I’m not being critical of others. I’m simply reflecting on how things could be if we were all truly invested in each other. Especially those people we call our friends.