JUST SAY "NO!" -- THE HARDEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO SAY!

JUST SAY, “NO!”

THE HARDEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO SAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 17, 2014

Erin go bragh!

 

Standing by the spinning plastic bag rotating stile, depositing purchases made by Beautiful Betty, my wife, into our shopping cart, listening to the cashier at the checkout, as she expertly pressed the electronic key to the barcodes, then deposited the purchases in bags, sometimes double bagging them should the purchase be too heavy for a single bag, all the time talking in a nervous staccato, it jarred my memory to a time long past with a certain painful nostalgia.

This lady with an Irish lilt to her lovely voice, plump, cherubic, middle aged, a woman with tired eyes but a stalwart chin, was working at Walmart, a cashier, a job she desperately needed, and was not afraid to admit it.  But that was not where the sorrow came in for me.  It was the content of her conversation.

She was telling my wife, "My son and his girlfriend moved into my apartment, a tiny one-bedroom place, and I'm beside myself on what to do.  They asked me if they could, how could I not say 'yes'."  She looked to my wife for support, but was met only by wrapped attention. 

“We got our bonus check for the year.  Mine was for $114.  It is usually $200 or more.  I had to use it all for groceries to feed my clan, what else could I do?  They have to eat.”  Her clan was the son and girlfriend.

"My son doesn’t have a job."  She pushed her hair back, as if to rid herself of the possibility of the girlfriend getting pregnant, then what?  She glanced at me perhaps thinking I was reading her mind.  I turned away.  "My place is not big enough for me much less company."   

All the time, she never loses the rhythm of her barcode clicking, or filling the bags, rotating the stile or her place in the story.

“It is my own fault.  I could have said, ‘no,’ now couldn’t I?," she asked rhetorically, and then dashed on.  "There is no way I can make my bills and afford to feed them.  I have no place for me, no privacy, no chance to unwind at day’s end, now do I?” 

At this point, I had to walk away, and BB got out her credit card to pay.  I couldn’t even mention how angry I felt as I wheeled the steel cart out to the car.  How many relatives I have had that were like this good woman, how many of my cousins and friends were sandwiched into houses and households where they didn't belong, with their parents and their parents’ parents?

How often this was an Irish ritual that became so common no one talked about it, or much less thought about it.

The first five-years of my life I knew of such a ritual personally, and have hated it all these many years later, a ritual when my whole family as I knew it was only my little sister, Patsy Ann. 

We would be with relatives or a foster parent  -- I remember an Aunt Sadie -- or other people who weren't our aunts or uncles or relative at all.  Then, we were split up and I went to my grand Aunt Annie and Uncle Martin, lovely people, but they had offspring of their own children, some seven staying with them as well. 

I never heard my Aunt Annie or Uncle Mart complain, but it made an indelible mark on my psyche.  I swore as a little boy that this would never happen to me, and it never has, although many times it could have.

Columnist David Brooks of the New York Times is a writer of whom I’ve become quite fond of over the years.  His beat is mainly politics, which is not a great interest of mine, although I am Irish and he is Jewish.  But that said I like the scope of his mind, which in recent years has varied off his day job to becoming increasingly interested in “going deep into the self,” territory which is much more familiar to me and natural to my inclination.  I think pain does that to one.  My wonder is if it has any connection to his memory of his own youth.

In any case, in a recent column he writes about the conscious and unconscious layers to our personality and make up.  Should he read one of my works, which I doubt that he has, he would see that the deep self is estranged territory to most of us, as we don’t allow our minds to have the conversation with ourselves that I have had over the years with myself, and now most recently with myself over this checkout clerk at Walmart.  And why is that so strange to admit?

We are heaped in the rational, the cognitive and the linear, in the quantitative grab bag of popular culture, in that which is approved by society at large. 

We are mainly instinctive animals operating at an evolutionary level with that “outer layer” (in Brooks’ words), instead of paying much attention to that buried “inner layer” of the unconscious.  Most of the drivers that control our behavior reside in the "inner layer."  This finds most of us self-estranged operating 24/7 on the "outer layer," or mainly on automatic pilot.  This was the case with this matronly and well-meaning checkout clerk at Walmart. 

Theologian Paul Tillich would have a slightly different take on this than I do, but only slightly.  He would say this women cannot say “no” to her son because she, as much as she thinks she has suffered and is suffering, has not suffered enough to know herself. 

He would claim that if she had suffered enough she would realize that if her son became contemptuous of her for saying “no,” she would have no problem with it.  On the other hand, if her friends and family were equally contemptuous of her, and this caused her great distress, then it would be because what they think and feel about her is more important to her than what she thinks and feels about herself. 

Tillich and I agree that only when people have moments of intense suffering, and I’m talking about mental or psychological suffering, not physical suffering, then and only then do they finally discover that they are not the person they think they are.  It is then that the masks melt away and they experience the comfort of being one with themselves, alone, self-accepting and self-aware, and have no trouble whatsoever saying “no.”

Should you think this is a hypothetical idea, you only have to ask my own children, who are now in their mature years, to find out that I have a legendary reputation for saying “no.”  I would like to impart this ability on to this nice lady, but each of us has to find this out for ourselves on our own and by ourselves, and of course, most of us never do, and so we have the pampered society of the Justin Biebers of the world that we have.