I've said many times that it doesn't bother me so much when
civilians look down at porters, but it causes me a lot of distress when porters look down on porters. I recently
wrote about a very disturbing conversation I had with a fellow HP in which he
argued for his own worthlessness and became annoyed with me for disagreeing
with him, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-delegation-argument.html;
and he is not alone. Most of my brother and sister porters really like the idea
of dignity statements. As you know, they work best when you have another HP
with you when you are carrying one out. However, there were a handful who were rather
irritated about the concept. "It doesn't work, Ben! They don't care!"
they used to say to me. I found this cynicism over dignity statements upsetting,
especially because it was coming from a HP. Ironically these HP's tended to be
the individuals who complained the most about nastiness and passive aggression from
civilian staff. What I offered them was a solution to passive aggression, a
viable and potent defence against what they seemed to hate so much; but they
just threw is away like a piece of rubbish. The fact of the matter is, dignity
statements do work! How do I know
that? Because everybody knows what humiliation is; it is as universal to the human
experience as birth and death. What I do not understand is the desire to
inflict it onto others without provocation. I have never experienced that, but
I do know those who have that desire exist and that the dignity statement completely
disarms them. It disarms them because they always know when they fire a
humiliation missile at somebody and it bounces off. My cynics sometimes point
to an example of where a dignity statement allegedly did not work. A civilian
friend of mine, a HCA, once came to me and told me that she had been talking to
"Miss stuck-up little bitch nurse" (one of many!) and the nurse had
mentioned to my friend that I had DS'ed her a few days previously. "Why
does Ben do that?" she apparently asked. "What does he mean by
it?" However, I am almost certain that the nurse said this to my friend
because she knew this HCA was my friend and would report back to me that the
nurse had said this. It was a forlorn attempt to neutralize the dignity statement.
Despite me explaining this to my portering cynic, he stubbornly insisted dignity
statements were "a waste of time!" and that "they just make you
look stupid!" It is sad, but some people deep down do not want to be free.
No comments:
Post a Comment