An incredible moment of enlightenment occurred today.

As a teacher (a profession that has always been denigrated, yet I seem to love more every year), there’s certain concessions you must make (these can also be applicable to police and health care workers):

• Never mention your profession at a party, or in public, because you will be vilified and people will stop talking to you (I tend to tell people I sell sandwiches at construction sites)
• 99% of the time you will be shutting the door to your classroom and doing what works best for you and your students, but opening it 1% of the time for optics (demonstrating you are fully on board with whatever fad is passing through this year)
• You are represented by a union and people really… really… hate that
• People will project their ill experiences of education on you, which loops you back to point #1

All of this is made worse during negotiation time with new governments and expired contracts. As it stands in the province right now, negotiations collapsed and we have initiated rotating strike days.

Instead of being in the classroom and with the students, we are walking the picket line. To be blunt–it sucks.

Getting into the details of my thoughts about the current situation would require more than a simple blog post or sound byte to the person who asks, “What do you think of all this?”

However, one thing I’ve come to understand is there are many things outside of my control. To stress out and fume about those would just be spinning my wheels for no reason.

This is why the Serenity Prayer is the most beautiful prayer one can recite when life is overwhelming.

Today, as I was walking across the street and speaking with a colleague, a man honked his horn at us and stuck up his middle finger.

Not uncommon, and pretty tame considering the visceral comments people were yelling out their windows the previous strike day.

I looked at him right in the eyes and realized… he didn’t see me as a person.

He wasn’t looking at me as a guy with a family and friends, grills in the summer, watches movies with his spouse, volunteers with outreach programs and has the same joys and frustrations we all do.

No. I was one of those people to him.

So, I did him the courtesy of giving him a smile and a thumbs up because, hey, I too have a finger!

Boy, he got really mad at that response. He held his middle finger higher, as if I missed what message he was trying to give.

I started laughing because I’ve had people yell some racist comments towards me over the years:
“Nice nose, you Jew!”
“Go back to the desert you f—ng terrorist!”
“You f—ng Muslims make me sick!”
(The fact I’m a Catholic, born in Canada and raised in an Italian household would be lost on those people who I’m forced to conclude are nothing more than ignorant degenerates who need to go away)

With a history of that happening, this guy holding his middle finger higher and with a more fierce look on his face thinks that’s going to upset me?

I continued laughing, then held up both thumbs and mouthed for him to have a good day. My colleague also gave him a thumbs up, because-hey, he had fingers too!

I thought that would be the end of it.

Nope.

He actually did a U-Turn and spent the next five minutes driving up and down the (four-lane) street giving all of us the finger.

I couldn’t believe it.

My thumbs up and smile triggered someone enough to want to spend part of his morning giving the middle finger to all of us.

How much hate do you have in your heart?

How miserable of an existence do you live?

What is going on with you, really?

It made me realize you really can’t let people like that suck the joy out of your own life. The more you stew about it, the less time you have for what really matters.

I have a lot of joy in my day and to take any of those attacks as personal would be feeding the animosity of what is making that person’s life so miserable. I hope for their sake they can get over it.

In the meantime, I offer my sincerest smile and an enthusiastic two thumbs up.