See It, Say It, Sorted
The Case for Busybodies
Last month, my daughter, Casey, and I spent a day at one of my favorite places in Switzerland, Oeschinensee, a turquoise-blue glacial lake high up in the Alps. To get there, you take a cable car1 up up up and then walk a short way down to the lake.
When we were ready to head back, we clambered into the little electric bus that ferries seniors and disabled people like Casey uphill to the cable car station. The bus set off . . . and promptly stopped so that the driver could remind some people to leash their dog. During the rest of our short ride, the driver stopped four more times to reprimand dog scofflaws, prompting Casey to remark, “I think this driver actually has two jobs—to drive the bus and to tell everyone to put their dogs back on the leash!”
I had to laugh, because the driver was so archetypically Swiss. He was also right. That day, the cows were out and wandering onto the road among the hikers. Swiss cows are not cowed (tee hee) by pretty much anything. (In fact, while we were having lunch, a cow strolled right into one of the lakeside restaurants as though she owned the place, to great merriment. No wonder a common cow name is Bossy!) But cows are instinctively afraid of dogs, and unleashed dogs can cause cows to become aggressive, especially if they are protecting their calves. So while the driver might have seemed like a busybody, in fact he was protecting the hikers from a possible stampede.
That’s So Swiss
I have lived in Switzerland for six years and can attest that the stereotype is true: It is wonderfully orderly, clean, safe, functional, and peaceful here. One reason is the culture. The bus driver was not exceptional; the Swiss cooperate to uphold social norms and ensure that everyone follows the rules. “See it, say it, sorted” reminds us that when something is wrong, we need to admit it, speak up, and then address the problem.
I fell afoul of this cultural trait myself once, and it was quite uncomfortable—but also effective. On Swiss public transportation, small dogs ride free, but larger dogs require a half-price ticket. My dog, Lynn, is small-ish, and she loves to sit on my lap and look out the window. Because Lynn doesn’t take up a seat, I had assumed she didn’t need a ticket. The more fool me. One day I was busted. Turns out that dogs only ride free if they are in a bag.
The whole time this was going down, a little girl was GLARING at me, and as she and her mom got off the tram, I overheard her exclaiming indignantly, “Mom! That lady didn’t have a ticket!” Oof! Her social censure was much more painful than my fine. And it worked, too: You better believe that Lynn always has her own ticket nowadays. Rules, and the social enforcement of them, make life function for everyone, human and canine alike.
So, Alice Munro
As we recently learned, the second husband of the Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro sexually abused Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, beginning when Skinner was nine years old. Public outrage has focused on Munro, because several years after the abuse occurred, Skinner told her mother about it, and Munro unapologetically chose her husband over her daughter. But lost in this conversation is that other adults could have saved Skinner but preferred not to make waves. Skinner told her stepmother about the abuse right away, and her stepmother told Skinner’s father. Instead of protecting Skinner, her father and stepmother concealed the crime. Worse, they sent Skinner back to her mother and stepfather’s house, exposing Skinner to further abuse. Even Munro’s biographer suppressed the story of the abuse and decided not to include it in his book because he “viewed it as a private family matter.”
We ought not to excuse this silence and complicity because (in the disappointing words of Margaret Atwood) it was “a generation and place that shoveled things under the carpet.” It wasn’t; it was possible to act ethically back then, the same as now. In a similar rural community and at about the same time as Skinner’s dad and stepmom were shoveling her abuse under the carpet, our church had a sketchy youth pastor. One weekend, “Pastor Tim” led a retreat for sixth-graders. After the retreat, a couple of boys told their parents that Pastor Tim had wrestled with them, and it had felt weird and icky. See it, say it, sorted: The parents told our head pastor, and he did not ignore the problem like, say, the Boston archdiocese or leaders of Southern Baptist churches. He fired Pastor Tim immediately.
You may be thinking, “That escalated quickly. How did we get from cows and dogs to heinous crimes?” My point is that it’s all connected. Whether it’s minor social misdeeds or major crimes, we err when we keep our heads down and soldier on, pretending nothing is wrong. As Rabbi Hillel says, “If not now, when? If not us, who?” Besides, petty problems like off-leash and un-bagged dogs give us the opportunity to practice intervening on Easy Mode, so that when standing up for what is right really matters, we feel braver about rising to the challenge.
So Why Don’t We Speak Up?
We do have legitimate reasons for letting some things slide. Our freewheeling, independent spirit and our live-and-let-live attitude mean that we tend to admire people who break the rules, and to dislike enforcers. And to be fair, some rules are dumb.2 Sometimes we honestly don’t know whether what we’re seeing is a real problem or a nothingburger. Sometimes it’s not obvious what to do. Sometimes speaking up is frightening and dangerous.
But let’s also not let ourselves entirely off the hook. Often when we stay silent, it’s for ignoble reasons. The adults in Skinner’s life didn’t want their comfortable lives to be upset. With smaller social violations, we might keep quiet because we want to be liked, and we can’t help noticing that our culture reviles and ridicules sticklers. We have only a few nice terms for them—whistleblower, for example—and scads of nasty ones—busybody, bourgeois, tattletale, hall monitor, informer, yenta, meddler, buttinsky, bossypants, nosey parker, fink, scold, rat, narc, snitch, cop, Karen.3 In fact we should be grateful to the busybodies among us. They are our advocates; they say out loud what we’re all thinking but are reluctant to mention. When they see something, they say something. And that makes it easier to sort it out.
What Can We Do?
It really seems like our country is going crazy, doesn’t it? When we feel powerless, it can help to remember that we are all capable of small, useful actions. Usually a quick, low-key reminder about rules and expectations is enough. On the street, we can ask each other to please put that litter in the trash and clean up after our dogs. On the subway, we can ask each other to please use headphones and extinguish that blunt. Wherever we are, we can show compassion for victims and give the perps some tough talk (or even just a stern look). People are social beings and respond to social pressure. Actions like these may sound insignificant, but every intervention is something, and something is more than nothing.
I’ll close with a story about a situation I encountered many years ago. See what you think.
On a crowded bus in Chicago, I sat down next to a lady and her daughter. The little girl was three or four, and she had a lovely mop of curly hair. Her mom was trying to put it up in pigtails. For what seemed like ages, the mom brushed and tugged, and the girl cried Ow! Ouch! and squirmed to get away. Everyone on the bus was watching in stunned silence, wondering what to do. It wasn’t clear whether what we were seeing was abuse or just a grumpy morning, but we all felt uncomfortable and worried for the girl.
Readers, what would you do if you were on that bus?
Here’s what happened. An older lady looked at the mom and said pointedly, “I don’t think your daughter likes that.” The mom reacted angrily. She loudly defended herself, saying that her daughter’s hair was out of control, and that if she didn’t control her daughter’s hair, her daughter would misbehave. Yikes. Wanting to deescalate the situation, I said to the little girl, “You have such pretty hair! I wish I had curls like yours. Look how long my hair is. Do you want to play with it?” The girl nodded, so I swooshed my hair down, and she spent the rest of the ride petting and playing with my hair while her mom finished the pigtails.
I don’t mean to pat myself on the back here. It was a difficult situation, and I’m not sure I would have done anything except sit in awkward silence if the older lady hadn’t spoken up first. Her courage made it easier for me to act too, and I like to think that the two of us made that bus ride a little bit better for the girl, for the other passengers, and maybe even for the mom.
How about you, readers? Have you ever spoken up to defend someone or to enforce the rules? What happened? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Lynn and I like to hike in the Alps:
But maybe we should up our game. What do you say, Lynn? Want to paraglide with me? (Lynn says no thank you.)
You can also hike up—I have done it twice—but why would you? It is drudgery: You’re in the woods the whole way, so there is no view, and the path is steep and muddy. I love strenuous hikes, but there are limits.
For example, I out myself as an American in Europe every time I cross an empty street against the light, instead of obediently waiting for the green.
Or here’s another example. Why do we direct our ire at the IRS for enforcing the law, and not at tax cheats, who are stealing from us?
“On the subway, we can ask each other to please use headphones and extinguish that blunt.”
I like this idea… but I’m never going to do it. In the U.S. we don’t have a Swiss culture. We have a combative culture. People who are listening to their music out loud or smoking a blunt on the subway already understand that other people don’t like it. It isn’t an innocent mistake, like your failure to get a dog ticket. Annoying other people is part of the point. It’s narcissistic—see me! I am here—and it’s sociopathic—the burden on others is the point. It’s a projection of power.
And, for better or worse, in the U.S. your fellow citizens are a lot more likely to be carrying the means to harm you.
But mainly it’s the culture. We have bred ourselves a culture of obstreperous, potentially lethal jackasses. And it’s not something you can fix unilaterally.
At our local town pool where I have been a member on and off for 29 years the rules are often broken. From relatively minor ones like eat only in designated areas (eating food or sweets near the pool attracts flies and wasps) to important safety rules like no using the diving boards when the lanes are open for lap swimming (you could land on a swimmer under water that you didn’t see) or no diving in the 4’8” area ( you could hit the bottom and break your neck) note I actually knew someone who did that years ago! So it is really annoying when I speak up to the life guards and they consider me a nuisance and/or to the manager who says he’ll say something but deep down you know he won’t. Many times the ones actually breaking the rules are the lifeguards themselves and I will tell them they are setting a bad example to the younger kids! So as much as I love going to the pool (it is my escape) it is also stressful, do I hold my tongue or speak up?