I hate self-righteousness

Self-righteous.
Def: confident of one's own righteousness, esp. when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.

There really are a lot of self-righteous people out there. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've been guilty of it. My husband definitely has. :-) I'm sure you have too. But it's really starting to bother me more and I'm paying more attention to it these days. Maybe the thought of motherhood and raising a child has caused me to question the world around me more than usual. Maybe the current polarized political climate has made it more obvious. Maybe I'm just obsessing over it for some unknown reason.

I think people don't even realize they are doing it. This is especially the case if you live amongst a bunch of people who think like you. When you are in the major majority, it is easy to forget that there are people with dissenting opinions. Case in point, I live in a neighborhood that is predominantly mid to upper class, white and thinks of themselves as very liberal. We have a very active neighborhood email list and you can tell by the posts that the assumption is that there is no way there are Republicans amongst us. We live in a fog of self-righteousness as we drive our matching Priuses, install solar power, fight for universal health care, etc. Obama signs has started to pop up amongst all the million dollar homes and I shudder to think what would happen if someone *gasp* put up a Mitt Romney sign or sported a Huckabee bumper sticker. And my friend Tamara won't even go to our local alternative grocery store, Berkeley Bowl, because she thinks she gets grief due to her slightly oversized SUV. I personally think it's because she doesn't know how to drive in a crowded parking lot. But I do think that if she was driving a Hummer, she quite possibly would be chased off the property.

But given where we live, I have to remember that if we lived somewhere else, it might be the complete opposite and we might be the ones who are looked at through dagger-filled eyes. However, the recent emphasis on the environment, the crap economy and the fiasco in Iraq has allowed all us long-standing greeniacs and left-leaning politicos to act more openly self-righteous.

When we started this journey, I joined the Ethiopia adoption Yahoo group that now sports over 3000 members. Because of the large and diverse membership, the moderator has set up rules that posts should be directly related to adoption and if you are going to talk about your religion, you must mention it in the header so the folks who don't share your belief can chose not to read. Seems simple, right? Several folks have chosen to ignore the guidelines including one person who posted a link to an adoption video that turned out to be a blatant anti-abortion message. You should see how indignant folks were. On both sides of the fence. Half were pissed that they clicked over to the link and it turned out to be what it was. The other half were pissed that they couldn't openly talk about God and how could folks be so intolerant and Christian-bashing. Everyone was very self-righteous about it all. At the end of the day though, rules are rules and as the moderator stated "if you want to play in this sandbox, you've got to play by the rules". But some people have taken it a bit far by calling out folks for mentioning that they pray or went to church or thank God that they got their children home healthy and safe.

And the other day a post popped up with a canned message in support of Hilary Clinton. The woman who posted it actually got private malicious hate emails. Can you imagine? My guess is that these were from folks that had been berated after posting religious content and who felt that this should also not be tolerated on the site (which is totally true). Luckily, it turns out that it was a complete mistake and the person who posted the message was a victim of some sort of auto posting bot and she didn't even know it was posted. I'd hate to think the left-leaning folks guilty of such hypocrisy even though it happens all the time. Hey, maybe my next post should be "I hate hypocrisy".

Then there was the discussion about black hair care which started as a simple question from a white parent as to whether she could leave her daughter's hair loose (vs braided) or would she be looked on as a bad mother. Next thing you know, it gets into self-righteous discussions about self-esteem, keeping the culture, never perm, do perm, don't straighten or this or that. In the end, I think everyone realized that black hair has a variety of textures and strength (just like white hair) and you can't generalize about how it should be cared for. But it took a while to get there. I wonder what would have happened if I added a post saying I was planning to give Fiori a blond weave like Byonce. That would have been funny.

Now I see why people try to avoid politics, religion and sex at the dinner table. But now I have to add hair care, child care and horse care (don't even get me started on that one).

So here is what I want to teach our daughter:

• Be a good person.
• Be compassionate.
• Be open-minded.
• People are the sum of their experiences and their experiences are different than yours. Understand this.
• Don't be afraid to express your opinions and beliefs and discuss why you feel that way. But don't try to impose these beliefs on someone else. Don't let them impose theirs on you.
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
• Don't be self-righteous.