PROPERTY OWNERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST DISABLED AMERICANS

CONSIDERED OPINION

By : Mr. Irwin D. Gallant, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lexington Property Management Group LLC (A Delaware Limited Liability Company specializing in commercial property rentals to Fortune 500 companies in cities across the Nation); Harvard Business School (M.B.A. summa cum laude 1990); Avid Jogger; Amateur clockmaker and watch collector; Christian; aficionado of numerous activities requiring undamaged arms and legs.

Hey you. Yeah, you: The fat fuck in the wheelchair. Get a goddamn move on it. I've got a whole line of customers trying to get into the store, and there you are struggling to maneuver your fucking lard cart through that double door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know you're disabled. But it's about damn time for property owners like me to tell you what we really feel: We can't fucking stand your lame asses.

How many times have property owners felt this way? They all do--every day. Disabled people are simply not fast enough to keep up with the pace of business in America. They frustrate normal people with functioning legs who are just trying to go to work, buy a few groceries and get home before 10 PM. And how much money have property owners spent trying to accommodate these worthless crippled fuckers? Let me give you a ballpark: BILLIONS!@!@! And I'll tell you another thing: Building expensive ramps for drooling fucktards with canes has driven numerous enterprising Americans straight out of business.

America faces worse threats than foreign terrorism. As a property owner and businessman, I can say without hesitation that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is the greatest threat to liberty this Nation has ever encountered. Fuck the Times Square bomber; he didn't hurt anyone. But the ADA hurts honest business owners every day by requiring them to build costly additions to their properties on their own nickel. And when business owners hurt, the whole country hurts.

Think about it: The Red Lobster on West 41st Street could have hired 100 dishwashers and 50 waiters in 2009 if it hadn't had to install a freaking "supplemental dumbwaiter" to lift paralyzed midgets from the dining room to the balcony. So in the end, a few lazy fuckheads got to eat the fried shrimp special in 2009, while 150 people lost their jobs. Fair trade? I think not.

Liberty is about owning property and doing whatever you want with it. Liberty is also about making as much money as you can from your property without worrying about other people. But the ADA forces property owners to do things with their property that they'd rather not do. It forces them to accommodate people on their premises who do not help them make more money. This violates property owners' liberty. It also robs them blind by compelling them to build doorways, elevators, extra exits and conveyor belts all over the place. That shit is expensive. And when business owners spend money on useless shit like that, it prevents them from paying out dividends, hiring people or opening new locations.

Put simply, the ADA is a terrorist law because it tramples liberty. In fact, most business owners would simply prefer to die in a car bomb explosion than watch their companies go bankrupt after wasting all their money on unnecessary elevators. Castrating a business' economic potential is just as terroristic as slamming airplane into a skyscraper. The result is the same: People lose their jobs--and their lives. And both are scary.

When we reflect on just how much it costs to comply with the ADA, we must ask ourselves: For what? What do we get for destroying businesses and bankrupting property owners? What do we get for boosting unemployment and dampening our prosperity? A society in which crippled fucktards can wheel into any building they want to spend their pension money.

I know it's "American" to say that everyone deserves an "equal opportunity" to see the Yankees or eat at Red Lobster. But who really gives a flying fuck about some paraplegic kid with a tube down his throat? OK, so we build him his own goddamn elevator and his own goddamn entrance door. Once he's in, does he spend money? Maybe his mother buys him a candy bar, a hot dog or some shit… oh wait, he eats through a tube. Never mind. What I mean is that crippled fucktards don't usually have much money to spend, and there aren't that many of them anyway. So basically property owners waste all that money accommodating them; and they get zero in return. In business, that's called a loser bet. And that's exactly what the ADA forces property owners to do.

I know what you're thinking: How can I be so mean when talking about Americans with disabilities? Well, I've got a simple answer: Because I'm honest. Life isn't easy in America. It isn't easy to run a profitable business and pay your bills. Life is fast-paced; if you can't hack it, you can't hack it. It's hard enough to turn a profit even with full body function; you can just forget about it you're legless. If you had the bad luck to get crippled--or you were born with some freakish defect that condemns you to lifetime care--that's your problem. You have no business doing business. You shouldn't be in the race. Sorry about that. That's just the way the ball bounces, mon frère. Apply for charity or something. Just don't stand in line or apply for a job with everyone else. You really annoy us.

Normal Americans just plain don't like being around crippled people. It makes them uncomfortable. When a family goes to the museum, they don't like waiting for a half-dead, moaning retard on a motorized gurney to navigate a narrow passageway. When young professionals go to a discotheque on Friday night, they don't like waiting two minutes for a blind war veteran on two canes to hop his way up the steps. When hardworking American workers get home at night, the last thing they want is to wait for a paralyzed woman to fish out pocket change in line at the grocery store.

In a word, crippled people frustrate and frighten everyone around them. Nobody likes them. Nobody has patience for them. In that sense, it is perplexing that the ADA forces both business owners and customers to deal with them on even terms. If it were up to the American people, they would stay away from cripples like the black death. But the law forces Americans to treat them "equally." This is both wrong and unjust.

To summarize: Commercial life is fast-paced; and disabled Americans are not fast-paced. They simply cannot cut the mustard. From an evolutionary standpoint, crippled people don't belong in commercial life. They can't keep up. That's the truth, no matter what goody-goody rhetoric apologists on it. If it came between hiring an able-bodied man and a wheelchair-bound man for the same job, no rational employer would ever hire the cripple. Why should he? If both men had the mental ability to do the job, why hire the man who needs a special entrance door and elevator just to get into the building? Why assume the extra trouble? In business, we move fast. We avoid inconvenience when we can. And cripples are inconvenient. The bottom line is that we don't have time to be nice. Time is money. So we hire the man who takes less time to do the same job. Plus he can get up and run errands once in a while.

Commercial life is like nature: Only the strong survive. Yet the ADA compels commercial actors to accommodate cripples and hire them on equal terms, no matter how unprofitable it may be. This is not only counter-evolutionary. It is also unnatural. Would a bee colony support bees without wings? Would a cattle herd help a cow with broken legs? Certainly not: Caring for cripples threatens the well-being of the healthy community. Commerce, like nature, is a death struggle against bankruptcy. Just as a herd depends on healthy, contributing members to avoid death in nature, so too do commercial actors depend on healthy, contributing employees to avoid bankruptcy in commerce. And just as a herd abandons crippled members to avoid death in nature, so too do commercial actors jettison crippled employees to avoid bankruptcy in commerce. In this light, the ADA forces commercial actors to unnaturally hire crippled workers who do more harm than good for the enterprise.

Viewed as a whole, the ADA terrorizes liberty and makes war on nature. In the name of "decency, compassion and humanity," it forces property owners into bankruptcy just to accommodate worthless crippled Americans. It hamstrings employers by forcing them to hire employees who are physically unable to make money. And it frustrates everyday Americans by forcing them to watch pathetic cripples take entirely too long to accomplish rudimentary commercial activities, like boarding a bus.

What is liberty if not the freedom to spend money as we please, to hire whom we please and to keep the company we please? And what is liberty if we must spend money in ways we'd rather not, hire clearly unsatisfactory people and keep uncomfortable company with paralyzed invalids who defecate on themselves in public? That is not liberty--that is terrorism.

As a property owner and an American, I say with all my heart: The Americans with Disabilities Act is terrorism. And I believe in freedom. That means the freedom to shut out cripples from movie theaters and fire people without arms. And it also means the freedom to walk into a grocery store at 6:45 PM without fear that a deaf-mute fucktard on crutches will hold up the line for seven minutes.

I speak for all Americans who believe in unrestricted commerce when I say: "Hey lady. Yeah, you, the amputee. Pick up the fucking pace, will you? I just got out of work. Friends is on soon and I'll be damned if you take two more fucking minutes to pay for that soup."

SEEING, HEARING AND REMEMBERING : PATHWAYS TO UNDERSTANDING

AN ESSAY

In ancient China, Confucius allegedly said: "Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand." I had never heard this proverb before. It captivated me because it encapsulates many of my views about sense, speech, memory, experience and empathy. All these things relate to each other. And they all aim for one thing: Understanding.

What does it take to understand another person? Is it enough to hear a person describe problems with words? How about observing something firsthand? What is the most effective way to find understanding and empathy?

I have often written that we humans are subjective creatures. We know only what we sense. Unfortunately, we must also depend on language because our senses have a limited range. After all, we only feel certain about something when we perceive it directly. We would prefer to see something with our own eyes rather than hear about it in words from someone who saw it. We want to understand our surroundings and the people in our lives. And the only pathway to understanding is sense.

But it is a troubled pathway. For what can we really know, let alone understand? Knowledge is not the same as understanding. Knowledge is more banal than understanding. Knowledge means that we merely manifest a subjective belief that something is true because we perceived it. Yet understanding is more subtle. Understanding means that we not only know things, but we intuitively arrange our knowledge to tell a larger story. Knowledge is about details. Understanding is about narrative. Knowledge is just an actor. Understanding is the whole play. And we don't feel truly fulfilled until we really understand something: What good are isolated facts unless they tell us something more significant?

Confucius recognized that human sense opens the door to both knowledge and understanding. Yet he also recognized that there is a hierarchy in human sense. He says: "Tell me and I will forget," implying that hearing is a weak sense. How right he is. How often do we hear language and immediately forget what we just heard? It is difficult to glean knowledge from language, let alone understanding. It is incredibly easy to forget words. After all, words are a poor substitute for actual perception. But in many cases they are all we have to reconstruct our perceptions.

Sight is better than hearing. Confucius confirms this when he says: "Show me and I may remember." Here, he does not say he "will forget." If he perceives something visually, he says he "may remember" it. Again, Confucius is right. Sight links intimately to memory. Our eyes leave "visual impressions" on our minds long after images leave our present view. When we reminisce, we engage our "mind's eye." We attempt to re-see images that have long since disappeared from sight. We may not precisely remember what we see; indeed, with time, memory weakens. So in that way, Confucius correctly points out that we only "may" remember something after we see it.

And we see all the time. It is simply impossible to recall every single thing we visually perceive every day. Our memory works best only after we see something worth remembering, namely, something exciting, unusual, captivating or appealing. To a large extent, our own subjective desires color what we remember. If we are infatuated with someone, we remember how they look with great detail. We hang on their words and even remember what they say. Yet those subjective desires obscure other details. We don't remember many things we see because we are distracted with our love interest. We are not paying attention; our emotions cloud our perceptions. Thus, while sight may be a better way to acquire knowledge than hearing, we will never remember everything we see. There is just too much going on. We cannot know everything because our senses are imperfect.

But Confucius does not end his proverb with knowledge. He goes beyond. He ends with "understanding:" "Involve me and I will understand." Understanding is the ultimate goal; the proverb builds up to it. He does not equivocate here, either. He says: "I will understand."

What is going on here? And why is understanding better than knowledge?

Anyone can know facts. You must merely have functioning sensory organs to know whether something is hot, cold, smelly, coarse, green or blue. Some facts require complex sensory deductions and inferences, but deductions and inferences are just mechanical mental conclusions. Anyone with rudimentary reasoning power can infer one fact from another.

But understanding is more transcendent than that. Understanding combines knowledge with experience and intuition. It is one thing to know whether another person is sick, obligated, depressed or happy. It is quite another to understand a person who experiences those circumstances. Understanding requires a person not only to listen, observe and infer facts about another. It also requires him to put that knowledge in the light of his own experience and honestly try to feel what the other person feels. That is no easy endeavor. It takes time to assemble experience. That is why we tell young people: "When you're older, you'll understand." After all, how can you understand a complicated emotional problem if you've never experienced the emotions that make it a problem in the first place? If you do not have experience, you cannot truly understand. You can know, but you cannot understand.

Confucius was right to extol understanding as the "higher result" of knowledge. Why do we learn? Simple: So that we can understand. And why do we want to understand? Because understanding enlightens us. It makes the world more comprehensible. Understanding equips us to help others. Understanding counteracts prejudice and shortsightedness. Violence springs from misunderstanding and ignorance. It is hard to go to war with someone if you actually understand them.

Yet the fact that human beings constantly make war on each other bespeaks a sad truth: Understanding is not common. It is hard enough to acquire reliable knowledge through hearing and sight, let alone to understand larger implications about life. Most people never even acquire the knowledge they need to understand others. Understanding is impossible without knowledge. And only a patient person takes the time to obtain the knowledge needed to find understanding.

Who has time for that in our society? Who has time to listen? And most importantly, who has time to get involved with others in order to understand them? Confucius' proverb said that involvement results in understanding. That means living with others and experiencing their lives first hand. That means living with their problems, too. Involvement is not just a pervasive sensory journey; it also is an emotional one. When you involve yourself in another person's life, you eat, drink, sleep and breathe their problems. You sense what they sense. You obtain knowledge at an astronomical rate. And because you combine your experience with theirs, you necessarily will understand them. Once you understand them, you can empathize and comfort. Or you can turn away. In either event, you are enlightened. You are no longer ignorant.

But that takes a very long time. It takes a lot of energy. To achieve understanding, then, a person must not only have experience and knowledge. He must also be patient enough to involve himself in others' lives in a compassionate way.

Sadly, neither patience nor understanding are highly prized virtues in modern American society. Yet people yearn to be understood. In most cases, they must pay others to understand them. After all, time is money in the United States. No one has time to sit down and listen to another person's deepest thoughts, let alone get involved in their lives in a meaningful way. This is one reason why people are desperately unhappy in this country. They want to be understood, but no one has the time, patience or intellectual capacity to "learn" their woes. This leaves many people feeling isolated and forgotten. Even married couples never take the time to really understand each other.

I venture that understanding offers its own rewards. It is satisfying to understand others and to understand yourself. True, it takes time, learning and effort. But it feels so good to know another person understands you. By the same token, it feels good to give back by understanding others. It is an enlightened and compassionate way to live. Despite all the impulsions to the contrary, sometimes it is good to be patient in our society.

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

WHO HAS TIME FOR INJURED PEOPLE?

Two months ago, I wrote a piece called "Rushing and Listening." There, I asserted that the "single-player program for success in American life" creates ingrained cultural impatience. Because not everyone can be successful, there is unforgiving competition for limited resources. That leaves no time to listen to other people. After all, to truly listen to someone, you must suspend your own concerns, focus deeply on the other person's words and consider life from his perspective. For the American success-seeker, that is not an option; there is just not enough time. He has somewhere to be or someone to call. He might listen to another person, of course, but only if it would benefit him in some way. In my previous article, I lamented this because it bespeaks an acute lack of humanity on the "road to success" in America. If we cannot truly listen to others, we will never understand them. And without simple understanding between human beings, there is isolation, frustration, suspicion and emptiness. Yet impatience--and its concomitant burden on listening--prevail in our society. In my estimation, cultural impatience reflects our society's dominant view that "other people" are fungible resources to be exploited, not unique individuals to be respected.

I revisit this topic to consider a specific issue: Listening to injured people. Cultural impatience makes it difficult to listen to other people, even if they are physically and mentally fit. There is no time or energy to waste attempting to understand another person's perspective. Yet if a person is mentally or physically impaired, there is even greater incentive not to listen to them. Even if a fit person tries to listen to an injured person, how can the fit person truly relate to the injured person's predicament? At best, the listener walks away with a superficial understanding about the injured person's circumstances. He says: "Too bad for him. It must be hard." Or: "I can't imagine what he's going through." Then he returns to his everyday affairs: Going to work, paying bills, watching television, visiting family, commuting, eating dinner and doing his best to find some joy in existence. At worst, the listener simply does not care. He says: "Well, thank God it's not me. I need to go back to work." Or: "I'm in such a hurry to get these errands done. Wait--didn't I see some injured guy today? I can't remember anything he said to me. Doesn't matter...my wife is expecting me home, and I have things to do tomorrow." Then he completely forgets the encounter.

What does it take to truly listen to an injured person? I discuss this because I know someone who suffered a devastating accident last year and now suffers from incessant post-traumatic stress. He cannot sleep or rest. Nightmares torture him every night and he wants to commit suicide. He talks about his pain and despair. There is no way I can really feel the same pain he does, nor can I understand what it must be like to go months on end without sleeping at night. I try my best. I want to show him that I am genuinely concerned and that I will do anything I can to help him. Yet even in this I feel helpless. It is emotionally difficult to listen to an injured person in a compassionate way. It burdens the mind. To listen, you must set aside your own daily activities and even your thoughts. You must focus exclusively on another person's thoughts, impressions, words and actions. You must even remember who the person is, and--if you know it--consider his history. It is difficult work. And it is exhausting.

Listening to an injured person alone is difficult. Imagine what it is like to actually be injured.

Yet most people do not put in any work to understand others who have suffered misfortune in life. They either do not have time or they do not have the energy. There are "more important things" to be done. Success-seekers have a distinctly egotistic mental state. Their thoughts are regular and calculated. They follow familiar patterns. They do not deviate far from "the plan." In order to listen, however, one must put aside comfortable, self-centered thoughts to consider matters from an entirely different perspective. Success-seekers cannot do this, even when listening to uninjured people. They can never abandon their mental outlook long enough to comprehend an injured person's predicament. They may be successful, but they do not have enough simple humanity to lay off "the plan" for a few moments.

True, there are contexts in which success-seekers listen to injured people in a professional capacity. When I practiced law, it amazed me to see how little lawyers cared about their injured clients, even though they had listened to their stories with meticulous, technical precision. For a personal injury lawyer, clients become dollar signs with stories to tell. Trial lawyers make their fortunes listening, processing, grooming and retelling the stories of injured people, milking details likely to generate sympathy in unsophisticated jurymen. But this is all show. Lawyers listen to injured people with an ear only for money-making details. They do not listen for humanity's sake; they listen as detached, calculating technicians. There is something morbidly perverse in this; among many other things, it drove me away from personal injury practice. For example, I will never forget a highly successful personal injury lawyer who said: "I spent all that time listening and she didn't even have a fracture, just a sprain. A fucking sprain! Where are all the good clients with fractures? Don't people get permanently injured anymore? Now we're just stuck with these shitty soft tissue cases."

No doubt about it: Lawyers listen to injured people. For all the wrong reasons.

In my heart, I always felt deeply for genuinely injured people. In fact, my basic compassion for them led me to practice as a trial lawyer. I spent hours listening, even when my boss screamed at me for "taking too long with them." They cried when they told me about living with debilitating headaches. They cried when they showed me their scars. And they cried when they told me how violated they felt after someone sexually abused them. I did my best to consider what they said. I did all I could to banish my own thoughts in order to focus on what they were telling me. I knew I could never understand their anguish. But I never listened to them merely to shoehorn their words into a money-making legal formula. That is why I failed as a trial lawyer. I did not "manage my time properly" because I did not rush clients through their stories. Strangely, lawyers constantly listen, but they are also extremely impatient. Put simply, they "rush to listen," get all the information they need to win, then move to the next speaker before repeating the process. But this is not true listening. This is mere self-serving sorcery.

I do my best in life to listen truly. It is a difficult road, but the rewards are worth it. In our hectic society, ruthless self-interest and egotism win the accolades. Winning is everything; how you played the game really does not matter once you have the prize money. The race always hangs in the balance; there is no time to listen to a story that has nothing to do with the race. But even the winners sometimes face hardships in life. They may even suffer injury, knocking them out of the race. They want someone to understand their circumstances and pain when the bad times come. Should it surprise them that "no one has time" for their stories, either? This is the hard, lonely truth about American life: There is no time for humanity when you need it most. Impatience is the pulse of success. It is all well and good to be impatient while mercilessly pursuing success. Yet when misfortune strikes, who will listen to you? Who will have time to care? I think we would all be better if we slowed down a little bit, took some time out and truly listened to each other once in a while. After all, it feels good to know that someone else understands us and cares about us. Listening makes that possible. What a shame that more people do not practice it.

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

RUSHING & LISTENING

Several weeks ago, I wrote about patience: http://reasoncommercejustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Patience. I observed that there is a conflict between “theoretical patience” and “practical patience.” We have all heard at some point in our lives that it is “good to be patient,” but all too often we give up on patience in order to succeed in a world that does not tolerate delay. After all, if we insist on patience, we may miss an opportunity. In this society, pushiness wins; patient people may be decent, but they starve. This society wants go-getters, not saints. Saints do not create jobs or invent useful devices. If something goes wrong, “strong people” complain. “Weak people” sit patiently by and trust that things will resume their course.

Today I venture that we can trace other negative trends to ingrained cultural impatience. At the outset, I do not fault most people for their impatience. I do not condone it, but I understand why it is prevalent. In American society, resources are scarce. There are not enough jobs and money to go around. This triggers vigorous competition. In order to win the race, people need to move quickly. Even short delays can jeopardize the outcome. Constant competition also sharpens emotional tension. People react more harshly to stimuli when they feel they may “lose the game” if they make a mistake. I very consciously use the word “game” here, because I think that the “program for success in America” resembles one. There are winners and losers, rules, rewards, tricks, traps, shrewd maneuvers, victories, defeats and all the emotional tremors that flow from a frantic confrontation. In the heat of a race, there is simply no time to be patient: You must focus all your energy on the finish line, no matter what distractions appear. And if you don’t win, you are to blame.

What is so significant about all this? For one, “the program for success in America” is a single-player game that necessarily involves other people. A person cannot make money without receiving payment from another. To that end, other people become “instruments” on the path to success. Rather than acknowledging people as individuals with hearts, dreams and emotions, the “success-seeker” looks upon them merely as objects to be leveraged to his advantage or—if they offer no advantage—impediments to be ignored. In fact, spending time with another person is a “waste of race time” if nothing comes of it. And because resources are limited, even a slight delay could cost victory. To the success-seeker’s mind, losing is a fate worse than death.

Against this background, it is easy to see why patience has no place in the “program for success in America.” If slight delays can cost the race, and if patience demands tolerance for delays, then the two concepts mutually exclude each other. Patience can transform a success-seeker into a loser. Nothing hurts a competitive person more than a loss, and to avoid losing, a competitive person will eliminate anything that may cause a loss. In that light, they gladly toss patience out the window. After all, why should they act in a manner that could jeopardize the goals to which they have dedicated their lives? That would be illogical and masochistic. While others may praise them for patience, those “other people” will not win the race for them. Their judgments, then, count for nothing.

To be clear, I use the epithet “success-seeker” in a very broad sense. I refer not only to those well-off, fanatically ambitious young people who want to be company executives, politicians, law partners and superstars. Rather, I use it also to refer to anyone who lives life according to a rigorously goal-oriented program intended to achieve personal financial advantage. Common to both groups is the desire to master time. In order to reach goals and win, success-seekers must accomplish set objectives within set timeframes. Time pressure, in turn, causes emotional pressure. And when a success-seeker feels the heat, he lets people around him know it. He will whine, complain, blame, excoriate, stamp his feet and point his finger. After all, if he does not achieve his objective in time, he risks losing the race altogether. In short, success-seekers alternate between delight and despair. Some days they will reach their objectives; on other days, they will not. The results will dictate their emotional state. When so much hangs in the balance each day, there is simply no time to be patient.

But a success-seeker does not limit his impatience to his career. In order to win in career matters, a success-seeker must adopt a particular mental approach to all life problems, whether professional or not. The success-seeker lives in a world of deadlines, achievements and failures. Delay is fatal. Time is everything. This outlook dominates his mind; he does not "turn it off" when he leaves the office. In the few hours each day when he attends to his personal affairs, he focuses again on time. He has only a few hours to find food, eat, try to relax and sleep. He must prepare his body for another leg of the race in the morning. Again, he has a goal to accomplish under time pressure. Again, he cannot afford to be patient. If some unexpected contingency interrupts his calculated evening, his emotions flare, just as they flare when some unexpected contingency jeopardizes his success at work. To illustrate, simply go to any supermarket between the hours of 5 PM and 7 PM. There you are sure to witness some nasty confrontations between frantic success-seekers returning from work and those who cause delays waiting to check out. If some poor soul takes a little longer than normal to move his groceries down the conveyor belt, the success-seeker will not hesitate to castigate him for his inefficiency. After all, even a 5-minute delay cuts deeply into the success-seeker’s limited personal time.

Impatience is essential to the “program for success in American life.” To that extent, it is extremely self-centered. A success-seeker has limited time to achieve his own goals; woe to anyone who impedes that pursuit. Success-seekers just do not have time to consider what other people might think. They rush from one goal to the next, snarling at anyone who slows their progress. That is also the reason why no one listens in American society. To truly listen to someone, you must stop what you are doing, focus on another person’s words and genuinely attempt to grasp what they say. That requires patience. It also requires some degree of compassion for the other person. As we have seen, however, the success-seeker looks upon other people as potential impediments to victory, not as individuals to be respected. For that reason, it should hardly surprise us that no one listens. You can try to explain your problems to a bill collector. You can say you have no money and your house burned down. You can say your mother died and you have no way to pay the bill. You can even say you have zero dollars in your bank account. To that, the bill collector will say: “How would you like to make payment? By cash, check or Master Charge?”

Impatience has everything to do with many Americans’ inability to listen. True, some people are paid to listen, such as doctors, psychiatrists, therapists and even lawyers. But even then, listening becomes a professional exercise rather than an exercise in humanity. “Professional listeners” listen for key phrases and magic words that involve their professional expertise; they are not listening because they really want to. They are listening because it is their job to listen. Yet if you truly care about a person, you will stop and truly attempt to understand their problems whether or not you are paid for it. You want to know what they are enduring because you care. But how often does this really happen? Family members and close friends listen; everyone else does not. How often have acquaintances told you their names? How often have they mentioned that their cousin’s brother-in-law is sick and needs help? How often have they mentioned that their mother lives in Akron and that they are planning on flying to Tuscon for Christmas? You don’t remember, do you? Why? Because you weren’t listening; you didn’t really care. You had more important things to worry about at the time.

What does this all show? It shows that humanity has little place in the “program for success in American life.” After all, to achieve self-centered goals, it is difficult to be patient. Without patience, it is difficult to truly listen to other people. Without listening to other people, it is impossible to truly understand their problems. Success-seekers rush through life, blaming others for impeding their victory. They do not listen. When they win, they relish the selfish joy that comes from individual success. When they lose, they curse the world and look for pity. But no one will listen to them, either: Who has time for that?

If people just slowed down a little bit and stopped thinking about winning the race, we might inhabit a better world. But that is reverie.

PATIENCE - VIRTUE OR VICE?

AN ESSAY

In my satires, I enjoy seizing upon virtues that involve “tension points” between principle and practice. Religious belief, for example, is a familiar “tension point:” A person may claim to “love his neighbor,” when in fact he cheats him and steals from him at any convenient opportunity. The gap between principle and practice yields hypocrisy—to laughable effect. Still, satire is not the only way to identify and criticize these “tension points.” Sometimes it is sufficient merely to discuss them. By understanding why tension exists in a concept, we can understand the values to which our society aspires—and fails to reach.

Patience is a “tension point” between principle and practice. Since childhood, we have been told that “patience is a virtue,” and that “good things come to those who are patient.” In commercial settings, people thank us “for being patient,” as if we had done something truly praiseworthy for them. Scripture tells us that “the fruit of the [Christian] Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, [and] self-control.” Epistle of Paul to the Galatians 5:22-23 (emphasis added). In other words, “good people” are patient. Conversely, “impatient people” fail to reach the standard.

If patience is a virtue, what does it entail? I always equated the word “patience” with “waiting.” My mother told me to be “patient” before dinner or before I received a gift. I eagerly expected something, yet had to uncomfortably wait for it. In those circumstances, “patience” meant nothing more than the “ability to wait without getting cranky.” After all, if I were impatient in these circumstances, I would have whined and asked: “When do we eat? Why isn’t the food here? How much longer is this going to take? It always takes so long to do this,” and so on and so forth. I would have been scolded for making such remarks, because I would have been “impatient.” If I were “impatient,” I would have refused to “wait without getting cranky.” I would have gotten cranky, and that is unpleasant for everyone involved.

But as time went on, I found out that there is more to patience than merely waiting. Like so many other apparently familiar words in our language, patience has additional dimensions. “Patience” derives from the Latin verb “patiare,” meaning “to suffer or endure.” The original root says nothing about waiting, although waiting in many circumstances implies a kind of suffering and endurance. In its purest sense, however, “patiare” implies physical or emotional pain. Waiting may be unpleasant, but it does not necessarily inflict physical pain.

In English, too, patience means more than “waiting.” The dictionary tells us that “patience” means: “1. Bearing or enduring pain, trouble, etc. without complaining or losing self-control; 2. refusing to be provoked or angered, as by an insult; forbearing; tolerant; and 3. calmly tolerating delay, confusion, inefficiency, etc.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th Ed.). The primary definition involves “pain” and “trouble” without losing “self-control.” “Self-control” roughly corresponds to the unpleasant “crankiness” that used to overcome me as a child, but it could mean much more than that. The second definition lends meaning to “self-control” when it explains that “patience” involves a “refusal to become angered or provoked.” That suggests far more than mere “crankiness.” There are few things as trying as facing insults. They conjure powerfully negative, violent reactions in people. In general, violence is bad, and if a patient man refuses to react violently to unpleasant circumstances, he appears good. Christian theology confirms this when it tells us to “turn the other cheek” to our antagonists. In other words, “patience” is a core Christian ideal, perhaps because it is so tempting to react violently to an antagonist’s goading. Finally, “patience” can mean “calmly tolerating” delay, confusion and inefficiency. These seem to be the most common situations in which people admonish us to be “patient.” For example, waiters ask us for our “patience” when the chef gets “confused,” serves us the wrong dish, then gets it wrong again, leading to “delay” and “inefficiency.” The natural temptation in these circumstances is to get angry, lose self-control and start excoriating people. In fact, the waiter thanks us for not doing these things. He thanks us for being “patient,” or forgoing our naturally negative reactions to “delay,” “inefficiency” and “confusion.”

Patience, then, involves “calm tolerance,” “self-control,” “refusal to become angry,” “forbearance,” and “refusal to complain.” These are strongly positive concepts. A blessed aura surrounds patience; it is no wonder that both common social values and Christian doctrine extol “patience” as a virtue. After all, our world besieges us with maddening inconveniences large and small: irate coworkers, screaming children, long lines, crowds, traffic jams, rude customers, ungrateful friends, inefficient airline workers, delayed mail, forgotten orders, temper tantrums and unrealistic expectations, just to name a few. We face myriad stresses every day and we have limited time to overcome their demands. It is not surprising that we feel an urge to lose “self-control” and to “complain” when contending with such “pain, trouble, delay, inefficiency, provocation and confusion.” Indeed, the natural tendency is to throw up our hands and say: “Screw all of this; I’m out of here.”

Yet that would be a negative reaction. The patient man maintains his self-control throughout all life’s difficulties, even the ones that strike closest to home. For example, a person may profess love for another, yet may walk out after the first argument. That is not patience. Everyone has a limit before they say: “Screw all of this; I’m out of here.” That is the measure of patience. We say that the patient man is good because he controls himself. He does not surrender to the temptation to throw up his hands and run. Like a true Christian, he forgives the “inefficiency, confusion, delay, pain and inconvenience” that torments him. He “endures” it “without complaint.”

But this introduces several conceptual difficulties. After all, we live in an ambitious society. We move quickly. If we do not seize opportunities, we fail. If something goes on longer than planned, we could lose out on a job or an investment. If we are patient in these circumstances, we may be acting “virtuously,” but we will not get the job. Similarly, if we tolerate a person’s insults or poor treatment for too long, we cease to be patient and become “weak.” Where, then, is the line between “patience” and “weakness?” And is it always good to be patient?

Successful business owners thrive on impatience. They do not tolerate inefficiency in any circumstances and move swiftly to eliminate it; they do not “patiently endure it.” Employers do not tolerate delays in production or productivity. They do not “patiently wait” for it to end; they actively step in and complain about it until they achieve the results they seek. And in personal relationships, people rarely “endure” more than one slip-up in their mate before throwing up their hands and saying: “Screw it; I’m out of here.” In all these situations, patience was not the answer. In fact, if the business owner, employer, job-seeker or girlfriend applied patience over impatience, our society would have labeled them “foolish” or “weak.” If that is true, is patience really a virtue?

In my work experience, I observed that patience was actually a vice, not a virtue. In practicing law, it was better to impatiently insist on immediate results rather than to patiently endure inevitable delays. In looking for a job, it was better to impatiently call employers back to ask whether they had seen my resume rather than to patiently wait for them to call me back. Popular phrases such as “You snooze, you lose” exemplify the modern world’s take on patience. If you’re patient, you fail. Go-getters are impatient; that is why they are successful.

At this point, we see the tension point between “theoretical patience” and “practical patience.” At some point, we all have heard that it is good to be patient. We even hope that others will be patient with us when we make mistakes in our own lives. But in practice, how often do we reject patience in order to succeed? There is a vicious double standard at work here: We may pledge ourselves to patience, yet reap nothing but scorn when we observe it. If we give our opponents too much time to answer us in a legal case, people call us “weak cowards” and “do-nothings.” In contrast, if we impatiently bother every single potential customer to win accounts, our employers call us “enterprising.” Similarly, when someone insults us, our society expects us to return the hostility with a fresh barb; we praise people who lose their self-control in these circumstances. Yet if a person patiently refuses to lose self-control, we label him a “weakling.”

To be brief, it is hard to be patient in our world. Sadly, people regularly exploit and manipulate one another, and it would be foolish to be patient with a deceiver. It is extremely easy to lose control when confronting all the frustrating inefficiencies, hardships, delays and injustices that abound in modern life. Nonetheless, there is value in patience. It is possible to acknowledge people as self-interested and egotistic, while remaining patient in principle. Unfortunately, very few people observe patience when their own success is at stake. In our society, it is better to strike hard and fast than to “calmly tolerate” delay and confusion.

If everyone were patient and forbearing in our society, we certainly would live in a better world. But that is not the case. In the endless race for success, pushiness replaces self-control, aggressiveness replaces “turning the other cheek,” and complaint replaces forbearance. In the quest for success, delay is fatal. That is why patience is more vice than virtue in modern life. And that is unfortunate.