You Have to Be An Asshole

Sometimes. On dealing with real people in the real world

Photo by Kido Dong on Unsplash

“You always have to be the bigger person,” my Grandma Nancy used to tell me. How she managed to say that with a straight face, I’ll never know.

I got all of my childhood lessons on being a fat person from her, wisdom carried down from her mother, Dolly, who died a few years before I was born. “You can’t choose to be fat, but you can choose to look neat and to smell good.” Stuff like that. I took it to heart in the beginning.

I even chose to be nice, too.

It made sense, with all of the lessons I was getting at Church — “the meek will inherit the Earth”, “blessed are the peacemakers”, “the last shall be the first”, “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved”.

I could keep going for the rest of the day. Literally. The entire New Testament of The Bible is basically the story of somebody who passively took shit from everybody around Him to the point where they nailed him to a tree, and his followers, who basically stood in the town square of every city in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, and offered themselves up as punching bags.

Okay, wow. That is a cynical view of The Bible, even for me. But that’s basically the take-home…