I've been thinking about education a lot lately. Mostly
about what its limitations are, but also because school is right around the
corner, the Trayvon Martin case and how education has played into the
discussion surrounding it, my work situation.
Lets start with the least fraught of those, my work
situation. I've spent my summer working retail at the same establishment I've
worked at for the last seven years (it'll be eight at the end of August). For
me, that establishment (which shall remain nameless in this post, but doubtless
you all know the place) has been a safety net. I worked full time for a long
time, but haven't been full time in years. I could never quite let go and just
quit. The people were amazing. I had a 401K I wanted to keep contributing too
(despite the stupid stock market). It was a change of pace from my regular job.
And essentially, it was, it is, easy.
Retail is easy in
lots of ways. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to help
folks pick a backpack. You can usually figure out how a GPS function from
reading the box. Its not difficult in an intelligence sort of way. You could
probably be dumb as a rock and still be good at retail. A fact that makes me, a
Master's degree holding, dead language teaching, book loving, dilettante of all
things intellectual, well, it makes me a little sad sometimes.
The thing that makes someone good at retail is the caring
part, which is the thing that makes it decidedly not easy. You have to care
what this person, this stranger, wants and then you have to care enough to make
it happen for them (if you can). You
must do this even when they're rude, when they're critical, they're indecisive,
dismissive, and even when they themselves don't know what they want. Keeping a level of interest against all those
obstacles is difficult. The added burden of keeping the store clean and presentable
doesn't help. Again, its not hard to dust. But its hard to care about dusting.
Its the caring that got me wondering about education. I work
with highly intelligent people, many of whom are also well-educated. What makes
or breaks them in the retail world is finding significance in their daily
retail grind. What helps them, what has helped me do that? Is it the caring
part? Or the education part? Or is it just plain old smarts?
That got me thinking about what makes a successful retail
employee, the type of employee that sells the pants off of good products and
does it day in and day out without succumbing to burn-out and boredom. There
are a few at my retail establishment and I've worked with them for a good
amount of years. I've watched them work. Its the caring that really gets them going,
but why do they care? And how do they care without caring? If you care and then
the sale goes, it sucks. If you care, and the person you're helping is an
asshole, that sucks too. If you care, and all you get to do all is dust because
its slow and there aren't any customers, that sucks most of all. So, the caring
yes.
The intelligence helps a lot. Problem solving and creativity
are a salesperson's friend. And education doesn't hurt either. I love talking
to people about the places they're going and the sites they'll see. I mostly
know about that stuff from reading about it or learning about it in a class. So
education helps a lot. But mostly its the caring.
Here's where Trayvon Martin comes into the mix. I wonder
about empathy and retail and stereotypes. You learn quickly in retail not to
give into your first impressions, since people often surprise you. Not always,
but often enough that you learn to give everyone, the same welcome and the same
service, regardless of physical appearance. The grungy cowboy? A millionaire
rancher willing to buy three pairs of boots at a time. That little old lady who
looks like she's got oodles of cash? Not willing to part with any of it unless
those pants fit her 70-year-old parts perfectly.
The filthy 20-something kid who looks like he's going to rip you off buys tons
of gear to replace his old stuff for his next thru-hike. Its just not worth it
to assume you know what a customer is going to do based only on what they look
like. So you greet everyone with the same smile, the same offer of help.
I've gotten so used to questioning my first impressions that
I often find myself doing so outside of the store. That homeless guy might be a
druggy, but he might also be an out-of-work IT guy who didn't make it through
the recession. Maybe that mom with all the screaming kids is just lazy, but
maybe she's been working all day and all night in order to feed her kids and
she just doesn't have the energy. A Hispanic guy in work boots and dirty jeans?
Maybe he doesn't speak English and does yard work and construction and maybe he
was born here and is working on his house in his old work boots and dirty
jeans. And that black kid walking down the street in a hoody and jeans? Maybe
he's got his hood up because its raining and he doesn't want to get wet. Maybe
he's got skittles and iced tea in his hand, and maybe George Zimmerman should
have worked a little retail before he trusted his first impressions. Because
his first impressions were wrong, and the cost wasn't a missed sale or an unhappy
customer. The cost was a kid's life.
I know everyone is up in arms about the Zimmerman verdict.
I'm not a legal scholar or even anywhere close to one. The legal standing of
the case don't really matter in the face of the larger social issues: that when
we see certain people we assume certain things based on gender, race, clothing,
cars, shoes, hairstyles, whatever. I don't think that's ever going to change.
Its probably one of the things that helped humans survive, since being able to
tell the difference between a friend and an enemy quickly, without thinking,
was probably the difference between life and death. But we don't live in that
world anymore, and today it makes a lot more sense to take a moment and question
those first impressions, especially if you're carrying a gun. That's what
bothers me the most, I suppose. That we don't take the time to think about
people's circumstances or connect with them in a meaningful way. Instead, the
tendency is the think the worst of people. Add deadly weapons into the mix and
you get a case like Trayvon Martin's. Awful.
And I wonder, as I always do in the face of awful events,
how to make it better, how to make people see past stereotypes. Maybe we should all work retail for a year.
I don't know how to make things better. Not completely. But I know this: Trayvon Martin was at least a little bit guilty of making the same sort of snap judgment you say Zimmerman made. There is evidence to support the assertion that Martin used a racial slur (the friend he was talking to on the phone testified that Martin called Zimmerman a cracker), but no evidence, to my knowledge, that Zimmerman did the same.
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning, Martin thought Zimmerman was a threat, just like Zimmerman thought Martin was a threat. Obviously, the fact that Zimmerman followed Martin around didn't help to dispel that suspicion, so Zimmerman's hardly completely innocent there.
But this is a two-way street. Either one of these men could have avoided tragedy by communicating and by being more open to the possibility that their initial impression was wrong. We'll never know exactly what happened and whether Zimmerman was actually justified in using his gun, but I think it's important to remember that there are two sides to every story and that in almost all stories, every character is both a little good and a little bad.
I agree with you to a point. But I also think that as the person armed with a deadly weapon, Zimmerman had a greater responsibility to get past his first impressions. I'm not saying that makes him more or less bad or that Martin was some angel. I just think that if you've got a gun, you should really think twice about what you're doing because the stakes are so much higher.
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