Different Strokes

Cute kid moment of the day: Milo was playing downstairs in the living room when Nora came stomping down the stairs. As she came into the room, Milo said, "I love you so much Nora." Awwww.

In the midst of this crazy you-can't-sign-a-petition thing going on at Jake's work is a hard lesson for me, which is, I cannot try to make Jake be me. He is not going to sign a recall petition, and he is not going to leak the memo to anyone. He is afraid of harm to his job; a job he doesn't exactly love, and wouldn't necessarily mind leaving for something else.

Jake is cautious and reserved. He is easygoing, gentle, humorous, and easy to live with. He doesn't seek out a fight. He doesn't find it easy to stand up for himself, so that's something he pretty much doesn't do, ever. (That sentence right there neatly sums up his entire relationship with his entire family.)

We are very different. I am opinionated, passionate, and outspoken. I get worked up easily over issues of injustice. I am courageous, but I can also be hot headed and impulsive. Jake is none of those things.

So of course, if it were me, I would not obey an order to not sign a petition. I would also directly speak against it to my boss, and I would make the memo public. I'd probably all-too-easily risk job loss over something like this. Jake exists at the other end of the spectrum, and there is probably a happy medium somewhere in between us.

This past summer we were up north and a weird, cranky old man started yelling at us for walking down his private street when we were on a walk. He wouldn't let it go, and he was being unreasonable, and it was dragging on. (By the time he started yelling at us, we were no longer on his private street; we hadn't realized it was private, it just looked like any other street.) I started arguing back with him, and the more unreasonable he got, the more aggressive I got. Meanwhile, Jake got more and more conciliatory. I think our basic natures are such that I am a "stand up and fight" kind of person, and he is a "do whatever it takes to keep the peace" kind of person. I am fight, he is flight. It is probably good that he is not like me in that regard, or we'd never have any peace.

So, I am pretty pissed off about this memo forbidding employees to participate in their constitutionally-guaranteed right to petition, but like it or not, it's not my fight.