If He Does it it Must be All Right

  Someone sent a clip of Meryl Streep's Golden Globe speech to me. I liked the speech. It was thought out, classy and delivered in a  calm but firm tone of voice. There is one quote from that speech that I would like to write about today. Here it is taken from the text published on the CNN Money website
   "And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose." She was talking about a clip where a person who was running for president mocked a disabled reporter.
  This hit home for me because it is a lesson I learned early in life. I went to school with a girl named Kay. For various reasons, Kay was picked on by our classmates. Kids liked teasing her about her first name. She was "Gay Kay", "Pay Kay and Hey Kay" to name a few. The hands down favourite was "Okay Kay" usually delivered in various mocking tones of voice. Not only did it rhyme, but it also sounded like stuttering which made it even funnier to our classmates. (I didn't think it was funny.) One day in seventh grade a teacher in class for some reason said, "Okay Kay" to her. Then she started to chuckle. From that time on, I think things were a little worse for Kay. Now that a teacher had made fun of her name, although it was probably unintentional, it meant that students could too. If she can do it, then it must be all right.
  By now some of you are thinking that this is junior high and adults are more mature and wouldn't do such things. My answer to that is that "following the leader" is not limited to children. It is something that advertisers have been using for years. One good way to get publicity for a product is to get someone with status or credibility to use it. This is the power of the celebrity endorsement. If he/ she uses it, it must be good.
  I can give you other examples. In 2000 Jennifer Lopez wore a green dress to the Grammy awards. The dress had a plunging neckline that went well past the neck. in fact it ended at about the lower part of her torso. No one had worn anything that revealing before and it was a little controversial at the time. Now you can find pages and pages of images on the web of very low cut dresses. (Although maybe not quite as low cut as that one.)  When Ellen De Generes came out of the closet in 1997, it was rare for a celebrity to admit being lesbian or gay. It may have been an open secret to those who knew or lived in the community, but to the public at large it was kept quiet. Now nearly 20 years later, it's not quite as big a deal as it used to be. If one person steps forward and does something, then it is easier for others to follow.
  This is good new and bad news. On one hand, bad behavior by someone of importance can lead to others thinking that it is all right to behave that way. On the other hand good deeds can be spread the same way. Remember random acts of kindness? For awhile there we heard all kinds of stories about people in drive throughs paying for the order behind them and people anonymously paying for meals for others at restaurants.
  What's even better is that this can be done by everyone. You don't need to have a thousand Facebook friends or a Twitter account with hundreds of followers to be a good example. All you need is you and a desire to change your corner of the world a little at a time. To use a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi , "Be the change you wish to see in the world."
  We can't control what others do, but we can control what we do. I believe that most of us have at least one person that we can influence whether we know it or not. I'll give you a couple examples. Several years ago I had a pharmacy tech who eventually went to pharmacy school. She told me one time that when she had difficult moments during her internship she would ask herself, what would Sophie do? I had no idea that she thought that way. The second example is from my classmate, Kay. When we were in high school her grandparents died about a month apart.  When she came back to school after the funerals several classmates accused her of lying about the deaths and that she was really just skipping school. One young woman in her homeroom gave her a sympathy card signed by the other homeroom students. She also made it a point to talk to Kay and ask her if she was all right. This young woman was not one of Kay's friends and up to that time, the two didn't interact much with each other. She was also a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that Kay had always thought was a little strange. Kay learned a lesson from that young woman. Watch how someone acts before you make a judgment, keep and open mind and not all people are mean. I don't think that young woman knew what kind of influence she had.
  We can all have this kind of influence......