Dilemmas, moral and otherwise

It’s been a long time since I came to the computer desperate to write. I got so irritated a bit ago over a tire situation with my car – let’s just say it was my fourth trip – over a tire that wasn’t fixed properly in the first place…and that no matter how many times I bring it back, the place won’t admit to any wrong-doing but will only say they’ll take care of it for me for free, as if this is a big gift, when actually they’ve inconvenienced me over and over again.

Of course, this was exasperated by having to get rides. Today, I was awaiting my ride from a woman battling a near 3 years-old over potty training. You’d think the world came to an end because the child pooped her diaper one more time. By the time I got my ride, about an hour later than I’d expected to go, I was rattled by the hysteria and wanting to tell the mother to quit calling her daughter “naughty”…while outwardly remaining calm and serving tea.

So I get dropped off finally to get my key to get my car, which is Still missing the hubcap that they broke the first time I was in, and the guy in front of me is chatting up the service guy, who won’t even look at me. After about 10 minutes, I fish my spare key out of my purse and storm out of there as the guy is calling “Madam,” and when I get home call, half to apologize to him, who had nothing to do with anything, and half to justify my irritation, because I hadn’t yet said a word about their shoddy service, which all hinged on their dishonesty about having broken my hubcap and lug nuts in the first place. There was still no admission coming as I recounted my history with them and why I became so impatient, and it was this lack of admission that had me as riled as the inconvenience.

I’d just read two articles – one on forgiveness and one on young people and moral values. The one on forgiveness was about not holding the grievance – for your own sake – and said “the content” of the grievance didn’t matter. It could be years of a horrid relationship and deep hurts leveled by your mom or the guy who stole your parking space. Either way, the same action, it said, was required: Feel what you feel, then let it go and return to calm.

The writer of the article asked, “But what if it keeps happening?” and it wasn’t until she asked, “How do I take care of myself?” that she started to get anywhere.

In the case of me and the tire, the answer is Don’t go back there. Get the problem solved and never return. The source of the forgiveness article was a guy who’d written a book, and he said, “Life is not fair.”

Okay. Point taken.

The other article, an editorial by David Brooks, was about young people and their take on morals and moral thinking, and even though Brooks found them to be nonjudgmental: “I can’t say what right and wrong is for anyone else. I don’t know how they feel,” he called the results of the research “depressing.”

He said the young folks, when asked to express a moral dilemma, as often as not didn’t speak of things that actually were moral dilemmas.

He concludes saying, “In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”

It was the kind of paragraph that in another context I would have celebrated.

It begs the question of whether or not our hearts, and our feelings, can be our moral compass if we haven’t been schooled or inherited examples of morality.

Can we then know what is wrong or right based on how we feel?

I would have felt so much better if I had said, “You know, forget about the ride. I’ll do it later,” and gotten away from the mother I could only imagine telling gently and privately, not to get hysterical. The tea probably wasn’t the worst thing I could have done, but the hour had become a strain.

I knew I would have felt infinitely better if the car place had just admitted that they could have solved the problem the first time … had they been honest. So honesty became my moral issue of the day.

Life is unfair. It’s ridiculous to get upset over a nail in your tire or with a toddler-in-training, but it happens. Still, I don’t think it’s quite so ridiculous to get upset by simple problems made insufferable…which both of these had become for me through repeated exposure.

But my greatest ire is caused by wanting to “teach” or “preach” or right wrongs. Is this in itself a moral dilemma? Or is the moral dilemma exposed in how I respond…or don’t respond?

It seems to me our hearts could do a fine job, if we listened and acted in accord with them. But dilemmas, moral or otherwise, are not easy, which is why they are called dilemmas.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 9-15-2011. David Brooks writing for the New York Times: Morality ‘It’s personal.’ Really?