I doubled up on my Wrong Words Day post and included it in
Facebook. One of the comments from a colleague of mine:
“It’s also just fun
to “be bad” without fear of persecution. I’m sure the kids in your class very much appreciate you
giving them that opportunity and it sounds like they respond in-kind. Bravo!”
I knew the writer and knew he understood me thoroughly. But then
I worried, “What if another reader thought I was giving full-tilt permission to
be bad?” And then I wondered whether that’s what happened to our fake President
when he was a kid. The teacher told him it’s cool to sing the wrong words to
everything and he never needed to learn the right ones. That he could just
shout and scream the song instead of learning how to sing beautifully and
in-tune.
So just to be clear. There’s a good kind of bad and a bad kind
of bad. In the good kind of bad, no one gets seriously hurt and the person
who’s enjoying the bad behavior also knows the value of the good. Perhaps
“naughty” is a better word than bad, a little mischievous twinkle-in-your-eye
kind of action that keeps you from being a boring goody-goody all the time.
The bad kind of bad hurts people and often intentionally to puff
yourself up and for your own profit or gain. You get so you excuse it and smirk
about it and find all the ways to spin it so that you can sleep at night
thinking you’re doing it for some righteous purpose when it fact it’s just
because you’re a jerk and you get off on putting others down. Sound like anyone
you know? And I’m not talking one person here— I’ve got a long list and I don’t
need to check it twice because it’s perfectly obvious who’s naughty and nice.
If these folks were in my music class as kids, they might have
had a great time on Wrong Words Day and that’s fine with me. But the other 174
school days, I’d need to work hard to help them discover that there’s a
generous, kind soul somewhere inside them and our mutual work is to find where
it’s hiding and coax it out and recognize it when it does appear— helping another
kid learn a melody, singing the right words with an angelic voice, really
owning one’s part as the Evil King in the play and then being nice at the cast
party. I’ll never know if I would
have or could have made a difference
in those people’s life, but this I know—I should
have tried if I had had the opportunity.
And so should we all. Wishing you all a touch of harmless
naughtiness and a whole lot of helpful nice.
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