Shame, Shame, Shame On You, Not Me

Think back to a time when someone called you out in front of other people, right when you were at your weakest and had no real way to fight back. Who was the one who should have felt embarrassed in that moment? Odds are it was them, not you.

Maybe you slipped up, or made a plain mistake, or lost your grip on something you genuinely wanted to handle but just couldn't right then. There are people who can't spot a single flaw in themselves yet somehow catch every stumble you make in crisp high definition.

They can be brutal about it, and they chase folks out of spots where those folks belong every bit as much as they do. Family restaurants are a common scene for this. So are churches and other places of worship. The jabs almost never come with any offer to pitch in and make things better.

These same critics tend to stay blind to their own shortcomings, and to the shortcomings of the people they're close to. That blindness runs deepest around behavior they themselves wrestled with back in the day. Grown adults with no small children anymore can turn shockingly harsh toward kids and babies. They've let go of the memory of what it takes to raise a child and how exhausting the job really is.

Most people react only to the surface, to whatever looks out of place, without a clue about the thing underneath that might earn a little patience. You rarely have the full picture of what's driving someone in a given moment. We were out at a nice place marking a birthday when my grandson melted down, one tantrum rolling into the next, and no amount of discipline touched it. Once he got home he was violently sick. Nobody could have called that in advance.

Lift people up instead of tearing them down. Picture what you'd hope others would extend to you. The genuinely kind among us feel no pull to shame anybody.

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