Polite Distance

Three days ago I wrote a blog  posting entitled “Consider Yourself hugged” and asked for comments.  In the string of comments that ensued, two camps began to form.  One, exemplified by the first comment below, found warmth and humanization in the experience.  “I understood why they folks did not hug in the beginning ... there are too many weirdos in the world and so we hold back. But when folks did respond, I was sitting all alone in front of my computer grinning from ear to ear - pure joy!  I'm reminded of Saturdays when my church informally takes breakfast to homeless under an interstate bridge. There is a lot of hugging, mostly initiated by the church folk. And the homeless love when the church children climb on their laps or run up with a wide armed hug.”

Another had an opposite response.  It's a nice thought, but sorry, but too "contrived" for me.  Also now a days, people who are "pc" would NOT touch one another.  I would like to hug the attractive girl in the movie, but inside I'm asking, "what does she want?"

Yesterday, I received this reply, which I frankly found as upsetting as the photo above.  

Without defining the era or releasing the call letters, this actually happened at events set up by a St. Louis radio station:

Over a period of time, the station did a lot of personal appearances, sending personalities to locations where they'd come in contact with listeners.  The goal was to bring traffic to retail locations where their salespeople could turn the listeners into customers. Almost always, the listeners showed up for the free hotdogs and t-shirts and nothing more.

One Monday, the station's Promotions Director was still mightily creeped out by a small group of listeners who had descended on her "show" the previous Saturday.  "WARTS!" she yelled. "These people all had WARTS, all over their faces and arms, huge freakin' WARTS! They were...the Wart People!"   It couldn't have been that bad, we reasoned with her, but she ranted on, saying she'd never do another remote. Things worked out, she returned to service and I eventually wound up in the remote talent rotation. 

Sure enough, they showed up at my first remote. A whole herd of them, God love 'em. Mother and Father and kids, all warted-out from head to toe. Not just a few warts, but Elephant Man sized warts. These were seriously disfigured people, but they were our fans and core listeners and they quoted us chapter and verse and whatcha gonna do about that?  It was one of those I-can't-look-away things, like a highway disaster. I didn't want to seem put-offish, but I kept my polite distance and let someone else serve them hot dogs.

We learned over the years how to accomodate their presence at remotes they always attended and how to gently keep them away from clients and other listeners but they always showed up and they never got rid of their warts. And they always got free hot dogs and t-shirts.

But, wait: there's more!  Some years later, during a reunion of the old guard at that station, I sat, with drink in hand, as our former Promotions Director told me the rest of the story.  "I sat with them on a retaining wall at a car dealer once," she said.  "I was closer to them than I had ever been," she said.  "That was when I noticed they had crabs (body lice) crawling all over them!"  Good God. Thanks for letting us know, now, ten years later.

Lesson learned. Touch a listener, pay the price. I am SO glad that I had someone else hand the Wart People their hot dogs.

You can see the string of comments (click here) if you like.  This morning when I awoke, that comment stuck with me and I decided to write about Damien and the Lepers (click for a link) or refer to Mother Theresa.  I wanted to give the “Wart People” commenter some idea of different thinking.  Different.  How am I different, I asked myself?  The answer came.

I’m a Christian.  By that I mean I find in the life of a man 2000 years ago example for my life, and when I follow his example, I’m happier.  But I remember an adage that went viral in the 60’s: If you were brought to trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?  So I decided to look for some guidance in the Scripture readings for today in my church of choice, the Catholic church, where readings of the day are the same around the world, and follow an annual cycle walking us through the life and death and return of Jesus, the guy I claim to follow.

Bingo!  DING-DING-DING …BONUS!  Perfect story shows up, wouldn’t you know.  It’s all about touching the guy you find repulsive.  Jew takes the dangerous road he was warned about, and sure enough, he gets beat up and left half dead.

• In the morning, a Rabbi comes by.  Yuck.  Can’t touch him.  Might be dead.  Unclean.  I got my clean stuff to do.
• Then a Levite comes by.  Think lawyer, ethicist.  Hmm.  Gotta figure out what is the just thing to do, but I’ve got no time.
• Then a Samaritan comes by, an outsider, a non-person in Jewish society, an untouchable.  He sees the Jew and touches him, and saves his life.  (Click for a link to the Good Story) 

So, Wart-People DJ-person, this one’s for you.  But it’s for me, too.  You see, I found you repulsive.  I wanted to change my comment settings to keep wackos like you off my blog.  Like that stupid Jew who took the road that he was told was dangerous.  They should keep people like that off….

It’s for me, to look again at why my first response was repulsion, like you with those Wart People. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four or five-day look at the Good Samaritan story as a way of living our lives, of figuring out what to do with people from whom we keep an oxymoronic “polite distance.” 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.