You and I Are Too Old to Keep Policing Other People

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

What is it with us that so many of us are compulsively minding everyone’s lives but our own?

The pedestrian crossing was just ahead. I slowed from the speed limit of 25, just in case one of the early risers might be coming over with a dog. Nothing. So I was moving at about 22 mph when a man walking the sidewalk gestured at me to slow down, as though I were driving too fast.

I was three miles an hour UNDER the speed limit, and Sparky the Civilian Policeman was directing me to slow down. No kids, no dogs, no students, no elderly folks out in walkers or wheelchairs. Nobody on the road but me, and I was driving under the speed limit.

It made me think about all those times I’ve tried to police people. Online, in particular. Oh, in our social media-driven society we love to do that, right?

These days policing other people is the new sport. We (as a society) police their thinking, their ideas, their grammar, everything. We love to tell them how wrong they are, about politics or religion or sex or race or whatever.

Folks love to say “but you just don’t understand.” During the Kavanaugh hearings when I wrote about being raped in the military, lots of MAGAhat men told me that I had no idea what I was talking about.

It is a combination of breathtakingly sad and breathtakingly funny that some strange man is telling me that I don’t know when I’ve been raped. That’s ripe all right. Policing at its best.

Try it sometime, gentlemen, and then you tell me if there’s any question about whether or not you’ve been raped. Just saying.

Racial policing is even better, telling folks of color that “they just don’t understand” when those folks’ homes are being invaded at night and people get shot by police storming the wrong address.

What is it, precisely, that they “don’t understand?”

We* aren’t going to force the rest of the world to our way of thinking and being. Why would we anyway? Why not take all that time and stress back and spend our days enjoying who we are, rather than demand the rest of the world change to make us more comfortable?

Unfortunately, that’s a big ask. Especially since the Internet is such an easy megaphone to shout others down and try to control them if we find their ideas or ways of being uncomfortable.

We as a society want the laws and rules to work on the other guy while we get away with speeding. We want other people to behave, but for those people to look the other way when we don’t.

We (and the term we includes this author) seem to be all over the Internet telling others what to do with their lives, how to live, telling one person after another they are wrong about this, that and the other.

When did we start wearing badges?

Apparently none of us needs a badge to police on line.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who willingly changed their behavior, beliefs or way of being after being bullied or policed on line.

You and I are WAY Too Old to police other people. What’s going on inside us is chaotic enough already.

This is, of course, why we feel the need to police others; it’s basic psychology. It’s also this ridiculous belief that if everyone else were more like me the world would be oh so much better.

Can you imagine how irritating the world would be if everyone were just like us?

My closest friends are quick to remind me when I complain about someone’s behavior or comments that the person I’m really complaining about is myself. I’m the one who needs policing, not them.

It’s my anxiety that’s out of control. The more uncomfortable I feel in my own skin, the more likely I am to want to police someone online. In fact it’s so predictable, these days when I find myself just about to fire off something wholly unnecessary, I’ve learned to ask…

what on earth is up with me that I feel compelled to try to police someone who gives no whit at all what I think?

In fact, the need to police others appears to be in direct proportion to how much anxiety we’re feeling. This article speaks to that compulsion to control others.

The piece outlines a variety of situations, including trauma, PTSD and growing up with addicted caregivers, among others, which can lead to a need to control our environments in order to feel safer.

It’s perfectly understandable. Forgivable, too, when we understand such policing as a coping mechanism. Doesn’t make getting policed any easier, other than certainly having some grace around where the compulsion comes from in others.

From the largest sense of colonizing countries policing the subjugated to actual police further subjugating certain communities to the offensive tendency to police others’ views and ideas on line, it’s just a symptom.

I’ve done it, way more than I want to admit. I don’t like this idea, I don’t approve of that take on a topic. I have a take on dumb people who die trying to hike Mt. Whitney without proper gear and really really stupid people fooling with bison in Yellowstone.

While a good many of my articles may center around an opinion that I want to explore and challenge, really,

Who made ME the Arbiter of Universal behavior?

Like everyone else I have a judgmental opinion about just about everything. I am often wrong, often spectacularly so. Most of the time it’s because I’m making ignorant assumptions, just like others have made ignorant assumptions about me.

Here’s a perfect example.

Some woman looked up an ancient Ko-fi account that I had opened several years ago at the suggestion of a friend. Ko-fi invites people to tip you the cost of a coffee if they like your work. There were photos from my adventure travel, travel that I have paid for with what monies I’ve earned.

She reams me for begging so that other people can pay for my extravagant, lavish adventure travel lifestyle. Since not a single person ever bought me a coffee on Ko-Fi, that’s quite the accusation.

Policing.

She also wrote that I “never had a job after I left the service.” I left the service in 1978, and have had plenty of terrific jobs and clients since. All easily verifiable, all on LinkedIn, in plain view.

I gotta wonder where people get the time to do all that raking of the Internet for people to punish for imaginary transgressions. They have time to police people but no time to actually do enough research to discover they’re full of codswallop.

Fellow Stacker

Kristi Keller

can attest, many of us scrape hard to “get” to do what we do in the world. There’s nothing lavish about staying in ripped, buggy tents in Tanzania while spiders crawl over me at night.

There’s always someone who is convinced someone else getting away with something. By god they need to be policed if not punished for it. People’s overheated imaginations will fuel all manner of jealousies and hatreds about something that often has no basis in reality.

For what so-and-so “gets” to do, there is often a price. It’s often a price others aren’t willing to pay. A perfect example are military people and veterans, and the discounts we get from various businesses.

YouTube is full of snippets of angry people barking at veterans and military active duty folks who DARE get a 10% discount. Many of those enlisted families need food stamps, so please don’t get me started.

To those who would police the people who protect their precious freedoms, from the article link above:

Food banks near bases see more military members coming through, and research recently released by the Department of Defense found that nearly a quarter of all military families struggled to put food on the table in 2020.

“They’re having to choose between paying rent or paying their mortgage, and paying for healthy food for themselves and their families,” says Shannon Razsadin, the executive director of the Military Family Advisory Network, which supports military families.

So to all those angry civilians who are pissed off that military folks get discounts, go spit. Because those folks have agreed to put their bodies on the line for someone’s right to get pissy about a 10% discount at a burger joint.

There have been times I was damned grateful for that free meal at Denny’s on Veteran’s Day. ONCE a year. I know homeless vets for whom Veteran’s Day free meals are the only time they have access to decent food.

This kind of policing is different, at least to my mind, than that which people display when they’re feeling terribly out of control, anxious and in pain. The latter is understandable, because it has its roots in dysfunction.

People who have PTSD, as I do, may police or try to control their environments to feel safer. I’ve got a lot of space for that because I’ve seen it in myself when I’ve had a rough day or have been dealing with chronic, severe pain. You learn to spot it. With work you can learn to manage it.

But the kind of irritable, self-righteous attempts to coerce, control and contain other people? Please.

You and I have no clue what’s going on in other’s lives.

Women in particular, get policed from birth.

To that, this potent comment from

Laurie Stone

:

"I'm not here to be evaluated by you. I'm not going to stand in place while you tell me the ways I need to reform, the ways I need to speak and the clothes you want me to wear. The audacity of you, world, to think I have time to organize myself to please you. I have no time. Not one more second left of my precious life to listen to your appraisals and complaints.” (author bolded)

She was speaking for the women of the world, and how might the world be different if we all stood up and set this kind of guardrail.

But truly, can’t this be said of us all, in response to the very human habit of barking at everyone about everything that doesn’t please them?

As if Almighty God is supposed to make everyone else behave in a way to make us more comfortable.

Two weeks ago some MAGA-hat read a nearly four-year-old article of mine on Medium. Was infuriated he’d been blocked, so he tracked down the same article on my blog.

There, he wrote a dissertation full of vitriol about what was wrong with me and what I had to do to change to make the world better for everyone else (read, himself). Oh, it was ripe. I scanned it just enough to get the gist, then blocked him from my blog site for 25 years.

Since then he’s written about me twice on Medium. He shows up as “Deleted User.”

The ploy of writing about you is a trick to engage you, get you defensive and angry. It works because most people can’t bear to have someone write about them and not know what’s said. It’s bait so that they can continue to beat on you publicly.

There’s no reason to read anything he writes because why, really? That’s like exiting our car to inspect road kill just to see what kind of animal it was. Such people don’t deserve our attention.

The greatest power is to not give a damn.

It’s stunning the extent to which people will go to exert control over people-most especially women- who dare to call out poor behavior or walk a different path. To try to control people whose sexuality is fluid or who don’t feel they fit in their birth bodies.

That’s policing of a wholly different sort. Imagine the lack of self-control exhibited by such people.

Leave people alone. For so many people life is already hard enough for reasons we can’t begin to comprehend.

You can of course blow this way up to talk about abortion rights. This isn’t that article, but it’s a perfect example of what I’m addressing. Policing of an entire gender.

Jessica Valenti

has plenty to write about with this country and others are SO BUSY policing our girl parts.

Who’s out of control here?

Years ago I mentioned Diana Nyad in an article on fitness as we age. I discussed her workout routine, which was impressive. She had just swum from Cuba to Florida. That was really impressive.

Some guy wrote a lengthy comment on my article disparaging her, her life and her accomplishments. By his own admission, it turns out he spends a considerable amount of time trying to tear her down publicly, claiming that she hasn’t achieved what she’s achieved.

In fact, he appears to have made it his life’s purpose to tear her down.

Imagine living a life so bereft of value that you commit your entire existence to attacking someone who was sexually assaulted and has had to deal with that the rest of their life, and in spite of that went on to very real accomplishments?

Who cares if she fudged something here and there when we have the ongoing Trump show? If you want to be offended by someone who gets away with lying, why waste that energy on Nyad?

But you already know it has nothing to do with Nyad. Just like the people who attack me, it has nothing to do with me. When we police others, we are always and forever speaking to ourselves.

Of course it’s hard to own this. Of course it’s difficult to look in the virtual mirror and point those fingers at ourselves. But that’s the invitation and the gift. If I’m willing to look at myself as the source of suffering, then I can address it, which is why I love Buddhism.

Buddhism invites me to find the source of suffering inside me, and heal it. When we do that level of work we see the suffering in others, acknowledge it, have compassion for it, and know that we are not the source.

This is why we can’t have a conversation with folks who are committed to policing us. Whatever wound they’re carrying, we’re likely not the author of it. Somehow they believe that by policing us, they will feel better.

Someone needs to pay for their pain.

That’s where the “aggrieved” comes from. So much of the pain is self-inflicted but it’s so much easier to blame someone else. To imagine that something external needs to change for us to feel better.

Yet even when someone is successful at changing the outside thing the fix is temporary. Of course it is. So they get busy finding something or someone else to fix or change or bully or police.

Most of us don’t much like change, change is scary. Whether it’s climate change or political shifts or generational differences or the very real and awful threats that too many of us live under, the majority of us aren’t good at living in the question.

Most of us are lousy at uncertainty, learning to deal with the grey realities instead of black and white.

If I can’t deal with grey, I may run towards, say, extreme right Christian Nationalism. If I find what feels like a safe haven there, then I won’t feel “safe” until the rest of the world has been converted. It’s all a lie, but my need to find solace in absolutes won’t allow for anything else.

It’s understandable. I get it. But bullying and policing others online or elsewhere isn’t going to make anything better. At some level deep inside, we know we’re being jerks. I sure do. In fact, the more we’re jerks, the harder we argue we aren’t being jerks, thereby underscoring our jerkhood.

Then we suffer even more, continuing the cycle.

Photo by Nicola König on Unsplash

One of the graces of going grey, if we’re wise, is to let go of the notion that it’s our job to fix everyone else so that we’re more comfortable and don’t have to change. We do change. A lot, daily. Age gifts us, if we’re open, with perspective.

One of those perspectives is that like it or not, the world largely doesn’t give a damn unless we give a damn about the world. The more grace we invest in the world, the more grace we receive from it.

The older I get, the more I watch what triggers me online. When I feel the urge to bark at someone, “correct” someone, or take issue, I’ve gotten a lot better at catching myself before I hit send. Not good enough, but better.

If I can be gracious about the process, I’ll see where I am wounded and also, what I can do to address the necessary healing.

We can choose to learn from others’ comments even if they are intended to do harm. On a good day, I can strip off the outer later of ugliness and look at the message the same way you’d crack a walnut to get at the meat.

It’s still a gift. The trick, and it’s not easy, is to not take such things personally.

Mr. Early Morning Traffic Policeman may well have difficulty understanding closing speed. Most folks have no idea what that is, and will misjudge how swiftly a car is approaching.

He may have meant well, for I live in a place full of kids, dogs and older folks.

Who am I to police him for policing me, when his gesture might well have been borne of good intentions? So there’s that: leaping to the conclusion that someone is policing us, when that wasn’t their intention at all.

Truth is we have zero control over life, over what happens to us. We do indeed have a good measure of control over how we respond to it. A fair bit, actually.

So if there’s any policing that needs to be done, speaking only for myself here, it’s for me to mind my own manners, watch where emotions rise, and leave a space of grace for others to be acting out of pain.

And that makes space for a great deal more of what’s very good in life.

Let’s play.

Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

Thank you for reading. I hope this piece invited you to think. Articles like this, when I own what I do, aren’t always easy, but they are always rewarding. If it was valuable to you, please consider

If you know someone having trouble with folks policing them, please also consider

Above all, we are always and forever referencing ourselves. A great habit of mind that I am still building.

*Before someone polices me on the use of “we” here, I am not saying that every single one of us does this. It’s a human habit, and of course plenty don’t. It’s the general use of the pronoun.