​​Leaving the Westerpark, after the beautiful walk and talk, I was thinking about something Cinema said about “not saying everything she thinks,” that this was the outgrou\wth of something I’d suggested.

Cinema and I have been having an ongoing conversation about when, where and how to intercede​ ​with men who, out of habit, ignorance or malice act poorly towards women. Mansplaining, for example. (I hope this note is not that.) Or, what does it mean when the middle aged waiter casually touches the shoulder of the young woman sitting beneath him at the table? Is that the privilege and power of being a dude? Is it sketchy as hell? Is it fatherly and warm? If it is a sign of injustice, what do you say and do?

These last few weeks I’ve been seeing the world through Cinema’s eyes and through the eyes of those young women who are in Amsterdam as part of Molly School. This has been overwhelmingly illuminating for me.

We all must have our voice and express ourselves in the world, whatever that means–with our boss and our friends and in relationship to the life we want. Thus, I would never tell anyone to ‘hold their tongue” if it meant in any way holding one’s life. And as a straight-up political issue, power must be told when it promotes or tolerates the unjust.

At the same time, we all judge the world all the time and all need to interact with the world we judge. If saying, “I want you to be different” or “that’s unfair” or “you are a jerk” were enough to change the person you might say these things too, well then, the world would have learned to be better long ago.

And what I am learning–and may have suggested to Cinema–is that it can be more effective to mull your judgment and calibrate how you express it so it gets heard, not only by those you want to hear it but by yourself.

Every time someone gets on their cell phone on the tram I want to yell at them “It’s a public train.” Those times I do this, it has zero effect except to fuel their rage and mine. They do not change and I get no catharsis. So I need to do better or figure out something new, or something. Make a different mistake, so to speak, even if I am sure the mistake is not really mine.

(Obviously how men treat women is a much bigger issue then the entitlement I see technology bequeathing my fellow passengers, but I think the dynamics of judgment and impact are analogous.)

What to say to sketchy men (myself included)? Dunno. Perhaps it would not be my place even if I did. What to say the person on the phone on the tram. Same problems. But I do think there is a difference between speaking loudly and speaking for impact, judging out of anger as part of a drama rather than scripting the world anew.

If we can couch judgment so as to at least offer the world (or those in it who we meet) a chance to think and grow, we have a chance to think and grow ourselves.

I hope it is clear that none of this is an argument for standing by as something awful is happening or for a silence that has even the whiff of complicity, for not letting the world hear what you think. Nor is it an argument for some kind of in-authenticity, learning clever verbal tricks to manipulate others. It is only a thought about how to turn judgment into a chance to learn and maybe serve.

I hope you won’t mind my expressing these thoughts here as a way of thanking all of you, and Carmen especially, for a wonderful and, obviously, thought-provoking morning.

Have a great weekend.