You may have missed it, but a new minor league professional baseball team has come to London, and they have unveiled their team name: The London Rippers. My friends and I have used the word ‘ripper’ as slang for ‘stripper’ for years now, though I have no idea why we thought shaving off one letter would somehow improve the word. Anyway, that’s not the ripper they’re talking about. By looking at the logo of the team:

You can see they are alluding to Jack the Ripper, prostitute murderer and now, baseball mascot.  Unpleasant and inappropriate by most standards.

The argument around the name and image has been interesting. On two different occasions, people have mentioned that there are other established teams with offensive names. The first time, it was brought up by someone defending the name and the owner’s right to choose it. Their argument was that, since these other teams (Eskimos, Blackhawks, Crusaders) have offensive names and no one was actively protesting them, this name was acceptable.  The second mention was specifically about the local high school team The Crusaders. This person was wondering why people were upset about the Rippers, but not upset about the Crusaders. His viewpoint seemed to be against all offensive names in use. So both sides of the argument over the new team’s name have cited the same situation, which points out the problem.

Each one of these names may be offensive to some people, and in a case by case basis, the wisdom of public opinion may come out in favour of the names being changed. But when you broaden the argument out to encapsulate the entire list of potentially offensive names, you increase the breadth of the discussion to an unwieldy size. Instead of focusing on the specific name being proposed and whether or not it meets the expectations of public sensibility, you’re now debating about the moral and ethical implications of several disparate elements, each with their own history and context.

Specifically, the argument against the ‘crusader’ name isn’t well suited as a comparison to the current situation. There are many people who see the crusades as a terrible instance of humanity’s willingness to commit atrocities in the name of religious devotion, but there are just as many people who still believe that the crusades were mandated by the divine will of god. In this case, public sensibility isn’t in any way unanimously opposed to the name. And, in context, the name was chosen for the high school’s sports teams when the school was opened in the 1950s, and the name was perfectly inoffensive at that time. Has public opinion on the crusades changed? Somewhat, but not to the point where you could reasonably expect a sudden name change.

In comparison, there is no one anywhere who would support the idea that a serial killer is in anyway inoffensive or appropriate for a general audience. The team owner and his advertising staff were well aware of the negative associations that would come along with their team name and mascot, and they chosen to go ahead anyway.

For the record, I do not think that anyone has the right to force the team owner to change the name. It’s an awful name. I don’t like it. But it’s not offensive enough that it impinges upon anyone’s civil rights, and so the owner has the right to name his business as he sees fit. The community will show their displeasure by not attending the games, and letting advertisers know that they do not support anyone who works with the team. And, if city council does their job correctly, they will assess that the community does not support or approve of this business, and exclude the team from any promotional materials or tourism programs.

I love to talk. I will go on and on about something I’m interested in, especially if I’ve discerned that my audience is even slightly interested in the topic. Lord help you if you agree with me, because that will just fuel the fire.

The trouble is, I sometimes leave a conversation feeling unsatisfied, and I haven’t been able to understand why. Recently, I’ve started paying more attention to that feeling, and experimenting with a different approach. It was really helpful when I had 2 consecutive conversations with the same person over two days, my good friend Matt.

In the first conversation, I blustered on about grand topics and big picture perspectives, and I left the conversation feeling unsettled. I thought about it, and I realized that I felt like I had failed to really connect with him. Sure, I had projected a lot of words at him, and what I was saying was correct in some sense, but it didn’t reflect the personal connection we have. I was speaking about ideals when I should have been empathizing with the person. The next day, I took another run at it, and this time I said what I had meant to say. No long pronouncements of ideology, just simple, honest and emotionally open dialogue.

And here’s the real secret: I listened. Instead of defending this system or that set of rules, I paid attention to his feelings and his experience, and I told him that he had done the best job possible and I was proud of him. And I am.

There is a time and a place for debates on public policy and the complicated nature of the human animal, and knowing when not to spout off and lecture is a pretty important skill. Hopefully, I’ll get better at curbing my speechifying urges, so that I can spend more time actually communicating with the people around me.

I have several bees in my bonnet right now, but I’m going to leave the sociopolitical ones alone for now and focus on the maelstrom in my head. (Note to Ed: you get a pass today, but we are still going to have a little chat soon, about your convenient ‘integrity’ and your inability to actually vote against terrible legislation.)

The more evidence that I see of the fragility of the human psyche, and my own easily derailed peace of mind, the more I’m convinced that the default mental condition of humanity is “barely sane”.  It’s an important thing to recognize, because when you assume that every person is psychologically resilient and durable, you hold them to practically impossible standards in tiems of stress. In reality, every one of us would come close to breaking into tiny crazy pieces if we were subjected to real hardships. Or, maybe more accurately, we would break to some degree and then rebuild ourselves into some kind of functioning emergency-mode. If you’re very lucky, you find a way to transition away from emergency-mode to peacetime thinking. Even if you do, the scars persist, and they affect your future decision-making. maybe it would help us all deal with the strange and irrational behaviour of other people to tell ourselves “they’re under a lot of stress, because dealing with X is hard.” For X, use any one of life’s challenges. Pick one that you have sympathy for, like “new parent” or “just learning to drive” or “just got fired”, and cut the other person the same amount of slack you’d like if you were in that situation.

On to my personal faulty brain wiring. I’m caught in a failure loop that is feeding off of itself, fueled by money woes and obligations. Here’s the gist of it: unless something very unlikely happens (read: giant sack of money falling from the sky) I’m going to have to go back to a regular job. So I’m back to looking at job ads, feeling terrible about my lack of job opportunities, trying to find something that I can both do and tolerate, but it’s hard to pick a new prospective job when you really don’t want to go back. When I get discouraged about my job prospects, I start to feel guilty about not doing a better job with my writing career, because if I had been more successful at selling my novel and maybe even found a publisher, maybe I wouldn’t be facing this situation. But, I can’t bring myself to write, since it won’t bring in any money. Caught between these two monsters, my brain locks up and I end up accomplishing nothing. Fantastic.

For the record, I’ve accepted the reality of going back to work, with one notable exception.   I want my little dude to always have a parent home when he comes home from school. I don’t know why I feel so strongly about this, but whenever I think about Max having to go to daycare to accommodate both my wife and I working, I feel like I’m failing him and I get angry at myself. I know that most kids go off to daycare. I know he can handle it. That isn’t helping me.