Sanctimonious Seaweed

Sanctimonious:  Making a show of being morally better than others, especially hypocritically pious.

After the meeting yesterday a guy asked if I wanted to join him for coffee.  I didn't but I did anyhow, and I really like this guy so you can imagine how I might react to people I don't like - which is almost everyone -  and I'm not trying to be funny here.  As you can imagine this puts a crimp in my interpersonal relationships.  Sometimes the coffee dude implies that I'm his sponsor, sometimes he doesn't.  I'm going to assume that this is largely dependent on whether or not I'm telling him what he wants to hear.

The meeting had 65 people in attendance and it was not a Tag Meeting.  I was happy about this for a bit because I figured it would save me the embarrassment of not being selected as one of the more popular members for two meetings in a row but then the same irritating people who always share began to share and this was, believe it or not, even more egregious than being publicly singled out as unpopular.

My buddy surprised me by saying that he thought the meeting was looking at some troubles in the near future.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.  "It was SRO in there this morning.  The meeting was huge."

He said that some of the Old Timers were frustrated with the way the meeting was being run.  The trigger, apparently, was that a panel of our local district set up some guidelines to ensure that women feel safe, un-hit-upon, in the meetings.  In fact, we had to ban a guy from the morning meeting because of his behavior towards some of the women.  And lest we forget SuperK sponsored a woman who was murdered by her estranged husband in the parking lot of one of the clubhouses in The Old City, so there is some precedence here.

"Which Old Timers?" I wondered aloud.  Remember I spent most of this still young day being Pissy Seaweed.  I grumbled something about Bleeding Deacons, I think, the term found in our literature to describe people with a lot of sobriety who begin bitching about everything.

He listed a group of men.  I have good relationships with all of these guys.  I'd even call a couple of them friends.  But most of them are jerks, basically, more or less.  One of them is a racist, sexist pig who once casually used the most offensive racial slur imaginable while speaking to me, in an unbidden, off-hand manner.  I shake his hand if he sticks it out but I've not spoken a word to him in the intervening couple of years.  I still marvel at what he sees in me that convinced him that I would be receptive to that crap.

I began to . . . well . . . opine openly about these guys, figuring that describing running someone down behind their back as giving my honest opinon.  I understand all of the theories that apply to people I don't like.  That they may be sick people who need my understanding.  That it's not my business to criticize god's handiwork.  That defects I despise in myself glow like neon lights when revealed in others.  I felt a little sanctimonious while I was doing it but I also think it's a Great Truth that there are some real assholes out there.  Vacation City is such a relaxed, open, carefree place that people have a tendency to accept behavior that I think is unacceptable.  Acceptance is great but there's got to be a limit.  If I see someone whaling on a child it's not right to say: "Everything is exactly as it should be in god's world."

I'm calling bullshit on that interpretation.