How to win
a fight with someone who doesn’t understand my reasoning? I guess I can’t win.
It rarely
happens anymore. I can read her like a book, roughly written sometimes,
unwillingly written maybe, with almost no room for an open end.
Stuck on
the linguistic level on the phone, I opened an online dictionary in a hurry and
tried to translate German or English into a language she understood. How do you
say “privilege”, how do you say “scientifically”, how do you say “psychologically”
or “doctrines”? How do you piece the words together to make a sentence? Why
didn’t she respond to the sentences I made? “Why don’t you speak my language?!”
“You just
don’t understand!” she complained.
“Yes, I do.
I understand perfectly why you are at where you are right now and all your so
called good habits. But I can’t accept it, and I don’t want, and I shouldn’t
have to!”
So, it comes
down to fundamental personal choices, well, my personal choices. Maybe I am not
ready to take you in as you are. I can’t un-learn what I have learned; and I am
sick of lying to myself. I can’t pretend
not to know what I know now, I was fully aware of the consequences.
Do I want
to be an unhappy Socrates or a happy pig? Have I become a victim of modern
humanity studies?
There was a
strip from Calvin and Hobbes where they were about to roll off a cliff:
Calvin: Knowing
means suffering. The less you know, the more happiness you will have.
Hobbes: …
As they
rolled off the cliff and landed on their heads in a pond.
Hobbes: I
don’t know how much of this happiness I can bear.
I had to
paraphrase it, couldn’t find the strip online just now.
It did
surprise me somehow, that we fight about tiny issues; but I knew right from the
beginning, such conflicts would come, and maybe at a velocity exceeds my mental
capacity. I am not from the 70’s, and I will never be, and I worked hard to
develop the ability to question what I do, or what I had been doing all through
my teenage years, what I had learned under given odd social circumstances, now
I have the right and ability to question it all and think critically –
translated into her worst nightmare and kept both of us awake all night long. It
is an inevitable war without winner but casualties.
“We will
find a solution,” I said to her, “it won’t be a Hollywood happy ending, but it
will be the best we can make off. I am willing to compromise, if you are
meeting me half way.”
“I have
been doing it all my life, your grandma has been doing it all her life too!”
“And the
cycle ends here.”
“We all
think that you have studied too much!”
“I have heard
that before. You’d rather me to lead a life that resembles yours, but it won’t
happen. I worked hard to prevent it from happening to me.”
“It’s the
generation gap that causes the trouble! And your over loaded studies and theories!”
“Do you
realize that I can just turn the sentence around and accuse you of being ‘under
loaded’ of studies and theories? Just like you used to compare me with other
people’s children constantly, without knowing that it’d break your heart if I
were to tell you that I’d wish for other people’s mother?”
“Hey, you
are dealing with human beings here!”
“I know, I
am one of them.”
Sorry love,
this is the only way I can protect myself, even it means I might compel you to
question your entire belief system and make you realize that what you have been
doing in the past 30 years is … actually … in vain. It saddens me to know that
you are thus hurt, it saddens me to know that I still have to protect myself
from you; but at least this time around, I won’t allow any insincerity, even it
means to give up a fairy tale ending.
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