Meanness and meaning
Last week, I talked to a former student about her practicum. What we thought would be an hour-long debriefing turned into two hours of stories of a toxic workplace and mean bosses.
She had unfortunately landed in a company where the bosses boasted openly about making their interns cry. Their strategies varied: overworking interns while the bosses went home early or did nothing at their desks; messaging interns at 2 a.m. to demand changes for an 8 a.m. presentation, only to talk condescendingly about the intern’s efforts throughout the meeting; and messaging interns at all hours (even while the interns were on official leave) and then branding the interns as difficult if they didn’t answer questions immediately.
There were many more stories from her internship, and even more from the slew of meanness that I had recently witnessed.
People were saying that they were calling out shortcomings, but were actually just insulting someone’s looks or intellect. People demanding attention and, deprived of it, insulting everyone around them and calling them forgetful, lazy, or neglectful. Spoofs of thesis defenses online, where panelists shouted at thesis students and sneered about formatting and sentence structure, but contributed nothing to the research itself.
Spewing. Grandstanding. Power-tripping. It is difficult to encapsulate all the different meanings of what it means to be mean, but perhaps a contrast is more potent. Last week, I was the master of ceremonies for a policy dialogue, “Educational Reform Conversation: Building Strong Learning Foundations in the Bangsamoro and Diverse Communities,” held by Tagpuan Ateneo in partnership with The Asia Foundation and the Australian government.
The conference aimed to bring together representatives of the national and Bangsamoro regional governments, plus other stakeholders, so that they could propose reforms for early childhood care and development. The first day was meant for researchers to share their findings, aid groups to share their insights, and short focus group discussions to talk about specific community problems.
The next few days would be for the actual workshops and storytelling for policy formation. The first open forum, however, became so rich and so long, and so dense with more people bringing up questions and stories, that I had to joke at one point in the vernacular, “This has to be the last one, or nobody’s getting lunch!”
The crowd laughed, but their questions and stories kept flowing, as though there were no deadlines, no hunger, and no tomorrow—as though no one had ever given them a venue to speak up before that day.
There were stories about feeding programs that succeeded and those that fizzled out, about good scholarships and schools crippled by storms, daycare centers that flourished and those that did not, educational reforms that stood in the same narrative space as budget allocations. Schools were being built, cities recovering, and towns beginning to see the world because there were long-overdue roads and bus routes just being laid down.
Stories. Perhaps that is what meanness is: where, instead of asking about a place’s problems or a person’s reason for behaving in certain ways, one would instead choose to label them as backward, unprogressive, hopeless, stupid, ugly, or worthless.
That instead of recognizing a human being, one would choose to focus on the rules being broken, the wrong committed, or the offense taken. That instead of seeing a person’s plight or a place’s misfortunes as the product of a variety of forces exerted by multiple oppressive systems, one would choose to reduce the problem to distasteful adjectives and name-calling.
Meanness is putting people in a box and measuring their worth by how they cannot fight against their prison. And the opposite? Allowing them space to talk about themselves, listening, and, if needed, making an effort to correct out of empathy instead of self-aggrandizement.
A shoutout to all the mean folk whose identities are built on the tears that others shed—who believe that being cruel is the same as teaching, who confuse authority with abuse, who conflate correction with cruelty.
“But the real world is cruel!” This disregards the many who are genuinely kind or who seek to understand before reprimanding. This ignores the efforts of those who do not have to use curses or cruelty to make a point.
No, the real world is not cruel—you constructed a reality that is cruel because you are most comfortable in a cruel world. You have no right to protest flood control projects that came out of such a world if you continue to reinforce the cruelty and indifference that spawned such corruption.
“But it’s for their own good!” Is it? Or is it just a need to let off the steam of anxiety, irritation, and displeasure? If that entire diatribe about reality and how people need to just “suck it up” also ends with “but this is just who I am,” then it was never about anyone’s welfare.
Oh, mean creature, this was just about you.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
