Fundamentally, it's about a teacher with bad memories of Valentine's Day. The "heartwarming" hook on the story is that she had her high school class make Valentines for each other, with the requirement that they say something kind and positive - and that they signed their real names, of course.
(The results were surprising to me, but maybe I'm just too cynical given my experience as a kid and teen, but apparently the kids really dove into the assignment and followed it not just to the letter of the law, but the spirit, and she reports she saw "shy kids open up a valentine and grin")
But anyway. The thing that struck me was her story of how Valentine's Day was ruined when she sent a 'special' valentine to David, the boy she like-liked, and she got back:
“Then my eyes traveled up to the writing above his signature. In large, uneven letters, he had written me a special message.”
My students lean in, waiting. You could hear a pin drop.
“It read, “TO THE UGLIEST GIRL IN OUR CLASS.”
If you didn't cringe reading that, you probably were never teased or bullied in school.
But yeah, and it makes me think of something I wonder about regularly: why bother with that sort of thing? Why go OUT OF YOUR WAY to be cruel? What is the benefit?
That's one of the things I don't understand.
I TOTALLY understand sending a positive message to someone - especially if you see them read it, you see the light come up in their face - that's one of the best joys there is, knowing you made someone's day a little better, and I have to say there have been times I've salvaged what had been a crummy day for me by doing some little tiny nice thing and seeing how the person I did it for suddenly was happier, it lifted me up, too.
But in the rare cases where I was "mean" (usually inadvertently) or was snappy because I was tired/overwhelmed, I felt WORSE and wished I could have taken back what I said almost immediately.
I know people are all different but are there people who actually feel lifted up and happier after they've broken someone's heart? I don't mean, like, leaving someone who is a bad partner for you - I understand that and sometimes relationships don't work out. And I don't even mean something like discouraging that person who's pursuing you romantically and in whom you have no interest (though I think in my case I'd feel a certain regret and sadness having to tell the guy "no" because I know how hard it can be to work up the courage to approach someone). But this: this kind of just random out-of-the-blue day-ruining. He COULD have just sent her a plain "happy valentine's day" card. Or, heck, he could have just NOT sent her one, and that would have been easier.
I think this is one of the things that fills me the most with dismay about some very highly placed and powerful people in our world today: the utterly casual use of insults* about people. On the one hand: if someone has to preface every reference to another person with an insulting nickname for them, I am less likely to consider the content of what they are saying about the person. (If you disagree with someone's policies or actions, criticize those, leave the insults on the playground)
But on the other hand: it's just low-level noise, like pollution, or maybe like a bad smell, that's hard for me to ignore and it gets me DOWN. Trump and Bloomberg trading insults on Twitter like they're ten years old is almost enough to make me leave twitter even though I follow neither of those individuals and am only hearing about it second hand. (What stays my hand? For a few friends, twitter is my only point of easy contact.)
But it is very much like trying to work where there is some screeching piece of equipment, or where it smells of diesel exhaust: some people can ignore it, I guess, but I cannot, it gets to me very fast.
(*I will note also that this is perhaps why more women don't run for elected office. We get EXTRA scrutiny; if we are unbeautiful or frumpy or out of shape in some way, that will be hay for the commenters and sometimes even the pundits. And who needs that?)
And so this is something I do not understand and do not like about our culture. Oh, it probably always has been - I mean, see "ma, ma, where's my pa, gone to the White House, ha ha ha" about Grover Cleveland. And yeah, maybe he wasn't a great guy (it's implied the liaison was not entirely consensual) but.....is that any worse than some of the things we've seen in recent years?
But it does seem to me it's harder to get away from, if it hasn't become worse. It's widely and breathlessly reported on whenever there's a spat surrounding the White House now. (Not unlike the schoolyard; that group of hangers-on who go "OOOOOoooOOOOOhhhhhHHHHH" when someone else pokes at the bully or when someone taunts a teacher.) It seems that we've forgotten what I was taught as a kid about "basic decorum" in public.
(A random example: even though some profs cuss in class, and I know the students do, I don't. I don't even say "hell" or "damn," which are now so mild they are practically in cartoons. Why? Because I was raised differently, and raised around people to whom if you said "hell" or "damn" they would be discombobulated and uncomfortable, and I don't want to make people needlessly uncomfortable)
And so I see all of this, and feel like our culture is going to ....well, it's going to what we used to call "The Other Place" when I was a kid ("it's not Heaven, it's the Other Place" said in horrified whispers). And it makes me sad and worried. And part of it, I know, is it brings up my own childhood experience. Where I got called "dumb" and "ugly" and the r-word that nice people don't use any more that used to be used to apply to people with intellectual disabilities and ironically also "egghead" and similar. And I got harassed a lot in junior high because my clothes were cheaper than what was seen as the norm at my school, and my fashion sense wasn't great, and I was a little immature in some ways (I still liked stuffed toys, I wasn't ready for "kissing parties," I cried easily).
But the whole thing that writer experienced, with the "to the ugliest girl in class," that could have been my experience, which is why I guess it was such a gut punch to read. And again, I don't understand it: what benefit is it to the person writing those words? It takes extra time and effort. Did he get to brag to his friends how he "griefed" someone, is that it? Are there some friend groups where boasting about the petty cruelties you do is a way of gaining status? There is very much about people that I do not understand.
Anyway. One of my fundamental "how to be a good human" rules is: do not go out of your way to be cruel to someone. And this seems to me to be exactly that, which is why it baffles me. If you really dislike someone* the easiest thing to do is to ignore them. I have a very small number of people who rub me the wrong way, and my way of dealing with them is simple avoidance - it keeps me happier and it means they don't have me in their sights.
(*I suppose there is the outside chance David ACTUALLY liked the girl and didn't know how to express it, the old "pigtails in the inkwell" thing. And yes, I know, it was a Thing for boys to be mean to or tease girls they like-liked. But again: that was not a language I understood as a kid, and still don't understand, and if a boy had done that to me my assumption would have been he HATED me rather than anything else, and so my reaction would have been to avoid him, like I avoided so many other people at school....so if he was looking for attention from me, he was thwarted. Maybe that's the real lesson there? If you like someone, learn what "language" they speak? I can be won over by an occasional compliment or even just slightly more than the expected level of kindness....and I also wonder if the "insult a girl because you like her" is what grew up and got pimply and greasy and ugly and became the whole "pick up artist" genre, which claims that "negging females" (negging, as in, negating, as in being rude to) is how you get them interested in you and it's probably no wonder the marriage rate in this country is falling if that's what people think....)
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