Teaching Americans to Argue Civilly

             In a quietly inspiring story in the USA Today network of newspapers, Gabe Cavallaro tells how Meg Heubeck of the Center for Politics' Youth Leadership Initiative (UVa) "works with teachers nationally to help students respectfully deal with the divides of our society through civil discourse, debate[,] and compromise."

            From what I've seen in comment sections of articles on line, and based in 40 years teaching courses in rhetoric, "the art of ethical persuasion," I'll suggest a broader project.

            One of the reasons so much of our public discourse is uncivil is that too few Americans know how to put together an argument and therefore fall back on personal attack. (Too few Americans can argue well privately with a spouse or other family member or friend, which is a related issue.)

            For the last three generations, middle-class kids have gotten little practice arguing in contexts they care about. Their families have fewer children, and family dinners have become rare, so young children don't get supervised practice arguing with siblings, with feedback from parents on the order of "'Johnny is a doodie-head' is not an argument!" Older children aren't routinely shooed out of the house to organize their own games, and by the time they're teens moving toward adulthood, economically-privileged kids are trapped in what I've called "The Little-League Syndrome."

            Little League Baseball and similar organizations for other sports, and grammar school and high-school athletic teams, teach kids to play the sports well, and these adult-organized and coached sports have been excellent for father-daughter relationships. They have been bad, though, for allowing American kids opportunities to organize their own activities and learn how to persuade their peers.

            On a couple of occasions, my students were surprised to learn my age cohort really didn't have Little League when and where I grew up, but teenage boys had high school fraternities and social-athletic clubs and ran our own leagues. "It's not like we built the parks and playing fields," I told my students, but we did put together teams, arrange schedules, and, sometimes, had to decide what to do with some schmucks who'd embezzled the money the clubs had chipped in for trophies.

            And there were year clubs for boys and for girls that arranged social events.

            Poorer American kids still have gangs — which look to me authoritarian and led by adults — but current fashions in middle-class American parenting and school management seem to preclude kids' organizing their own activities.

            So, one thing that can be done to improve American discourse is for parents and other adults to teach children basic manners and insist on basic decency to others — including no bullying — and to draw back a bit at a time to allow older kids to run more of their own activities and have to persuade one another to do what they want them to do.

            Little League and such teaches kids how to fit into a bureaucracy and follow orders; kid-organized activities teach democratic organizing, which includes persuasion of peers on issues kids care about (and some activities that may legitimately horrify their parents and others in authority).

            The schools need to teach things kids may care less about: argument as a kind of summation of skills, but also description and definition and analysis and other "modes" of discourse. For a slogan for this kind of teaching, we used to have "Unplug the Scantron machines!": i.e., get rid of multiple-choice tests (as an ultimate goal) and have students write out present orally descriptions, extended definitions, analyses, and finally arguments.

            Logical thought isn't exactly natural, and kids need to be taught, and adults need to be reminded, how to use evidence and present a logical argument (if one with enough of an emotional appeal to get it accepted).

            And young adults and some older ones need to be taught how to debate with one another on matters for adults, and for citizens.

            This doesn't mean just pure politics, but — obviously! — issues in the sciences, including military science and tactics, history, theology, and the arts. And it means some training in the sort of deep analysis where you can figure out why political arguments so often go in circles.

            One reasons for a "failure to communicate": Different people often use the same key words with different meanings. E.g., if a human being is essentially a soul to be saved and "ensoulment" occurs at conception, then abortion may be worse than murder. If you're not big on theories of souls and/or if you think theological issues shouldn't enter American politics — then you'll have a different view on abortion (and we haven't even gotten to historical questions on control of women's bodies!). For another example, what do we mean by "patriot"? In 1969 or so, I told an FBI agent, "Mr. N_____ is a very patriotic young man" since Mr. N_____ started out in Marine ROTC, studied US warfare in Vietnam and decided it was wrong, dropped his plans for a military career, and joined the Peace Movement, actively opposing the war. Now that is a patriot, like John Kerry, only a bit earlier. The FBI agent may have had different ideas on patriotism and, indeed, might have thought my idea of a patriot his idea of a traitor.

            The sort of rough-and-ready analysis I just did requires training, and pulling it off in the real world requires practice — a lot of practice — in controlling one's temper and getting opponents to control theirs.

            Meg Heubeck is doing important and difficult work; she deserves a wide variety of support.

Insulting Hillary Clinton (and Others)

This question introduced a long post on my Facebook page: "Why do some Bernie supporters and leftists insist on insulting Hillary?" My lightly edited response follows.

            Attacks on Hillary Clinton's record and positions are legitimate, keeping pressure on her and her campaign to do what her critics want her to do: that is how this very serious game is played. To speak to this as a non-rhetorical question on insults, though — here, I think, are some of the broader reasons.

            (1) Too few Americans spend a lot of time in actual communities, i.e., places where people are stuck with one another for the foreseeable future. This leads to the temptation to say any damn thing one feels strongly about.

            (2) Where Americans do live in communities, many of us live in the results of "the big sort," i.e., surrounded by people with similar attitudes, so saying any damn thing we feel strongly about probably will bring agreement.

            (3) Many of us spend time in virtual "communities," with "community" emphatically in quotation marks: places where we can be pretty anonymous and enter and leave at low cost, and places where we feel we can say any damn thing we feel strongly about.

            (4) We're in another age of sentiment ("Get in touch with your feelings, Luke"), where it's seen as unproblematically good to feel strongly and share those feelings with the group.

            (5) As the custom of "busting" ("signifying on," "cut contests," "doing the dozens") show, the adolescent male tradition of the flyting — insult contests — is alive and both well and ill and increasingly unisex. Insults are sincere and sincerity is good ... and again, people can say any damn thing, with extra points for "transgressivity," until they breach some still- or recently-fashionable taboo.

            (6) Relatively few Americans grow up political and so haven't learned that there are instances when one must affront the neighbors and get into arguments, and therefore one should rigorously avoid pissing others off unnecessarily.

            (7) Relatively few Americans grow up political and in real neighborhoods, so many fail to learn to never piss off the neighbors unnecessarily because you never know when you might need a favor.

            (8) Many young Americans have had their self-esteem maintained strongly and work under the idea that they can say any damn thing and insult people and still be able to ask those people for favors.

                        (The editor of The Miami Student student newspaper sent me a Christmas card, which was a nice gesture, and used the opportunity to drop my column. She reassured me, though, that all was well since she'd replaced me with a colleague of mine who was a highly popular professor who she was sure would make an excellent columnist. My friends and I joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I might write her one because at a young age she had the sort of total sociopathic insensitivity typical of real-pro newspaper editors. Within a week, she asked me for a letter of recommendation.)

            (9) The relatively hard Left and hard Right attract people who put ideas above people and put their ideas above just about any people they are not politically infatuated with. Such folk will say any damn thing they think demonstrates their love of the Good, the True, and the pretty ugly, but screw it: if you disagree, you're just wrong and evil. 

The Lion and the Mouse — and the Alligator (23 Jan. 2014)

"Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."

— Haitian Proverb I Like to Quote

            When I left Cornell U in Ithaca, NY, my friends gave me a copy of a book of classic insults, which had as its headnote what I have as mine above: "Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."
            I have not always followed this good advice, but at least in theory I would go further and advise against insulting even small alligators even when you're well beyond the river and are pretty sure you'll never see an alligator again. Yea, verily I would say unto you: If you can, make the alligator your friend.
            Three examples, two from the side of the human, and one from a small and figurative alligator's point of view.
            In my late teens, when I was a junior counselor or counselor at a summer camp, teaching archery, a father visiting "my" archery range nocked an arrow and drew a bow while facing away from the targets. We didn't have the term "zero tolerance" back then, and I wouldn't have liked the idea — I definitely don't like it now — but one should never, ever fuck around with weapons of any sort, so I told the aging juvenile to leave the range. I was later asked by a fellow counselor if I knew who the wise guy was. "Sewer Rat's father," I said, naming one of the less popular campers. "Uh huh," my colleague said, and left smiling cryptically.
            When the summer was over and I was back in the City, I read in the pre-Rupert-Murdoch Chicago Sun-Times that Sewer Rat's father had been found in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental with a couple bullets in his head: as we used to say at that time in Chicago, "an obvious suicide."
            On a later occasion, when I was a college junior or senior and a fraternity officer, I called the home of a pledge to remind him he was to come back from vacation a couple days early to help get the house ready for mid-year Rush.
            While we were mopping floors, or whatever, a fraternity brother of mine noted that the pledge in question had been dropped off by his father, who seemed somewhat pissed off at the house generally and, perhaps, me in particular. No big deal, but … "You were polite and respectful, right?" Of course I had been, but firm; I had other calls to make, and if I had to cut my vacation short a couple days, so could a freshman who would've been flunking out of school at a neighborhood animal house if I hadn't gone along with getting him depledged there and over to us in an arcane maneuver arranged by our Rush Chairman and agreed to by the other house with rapidity and graciousness that I should have thought more about.
            "You were polite and respectful right?" "Yeah. Why is this significant?" Did I know what the pledge's father did for a living? I did not. "Contract work," I was told. Maybe a couple contracts a year, and they lived on that, lived very, very well. When this Dad visited again, I didn't make a big deal out of it, but I did show, briefly, unostentatiously just how respectful I could be.
            Nice thing growing up in Chicago when I did: You learned the wisdom of manners if for no other reason than you could never be sure with whom you were dealing and if and how that person might be, as they said, "connected."
            An armed society probably isn't a polite society, certainly not in Chicago, but it can reduce young males' tendencies toward incivility if Ms. Manners might be a representative from the local B'nai Mafia chapter and advise respect while carrying a tire iron.
            My story from the other side, so to speak, is from the subtler world of scholarship. Long ago, I wrote a couple articles dealing with (among other things) Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's fine but underrated and under-read 1955 novel, Gladiator-at-Law. My writing went unnoticed for years, and then I came across an article by a young scholar that not only cited my work but (unnecessarily for the citation) commented on it briefly, but at sufficient length to suggest that it — my work on this novel, my whole rather old-fashioned approach, actually — sucked.
            Okay, I finally get a citation, and a bit of a comment to boot, and it's insulting. Like the guy could have just had the citation, or said that I took an approach different from his and one he thought less useful, but, nah, he had to say something harsh.
            A couple more years pass, and I get a note from the guy who cited me saying, more or less, Hi, hey, what a coincidence, the Chair of his department —let's call him Rick — was a friend of mine from grad school and Rick said that the young scholar should write me. The guy needed an outside evaluation of his scholarship, which he hadn't had time to write much of, so his Gladiator-at-Law piece was going to be important for him to get tenure, and I was one of the few other people to write on the novel at the time and Rick said that I'd write a carefully composed and effective letter for him because I was a nice guy and a responsible scholar and would always give an honest evaluation and all the young scholar had to do was ask me politely and grovel, just a bit. He groveled; I wrote. The punk got tenure.
            "Keep your words soft and sweet," mostly — to modify somewhat a quotation attributed to Andy Rooney — "just in case you have to eat them.” But we should go even farther than avoiding giving offense. And here I'll paste in a fable out of Aesop that I learned as a child and — since I read it in a Latin version in college, not because it was around in my childhood — I'm sure is out of copyright.

A Lion asleep in his lair was waked up by a Mouse running over his face. Losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it. The Mouse, terrified, piteously entreated him to spare its life. "Please let me go," it cried, "and one day I will repay you for your kindness." The idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the Lion so much that he laughed aloud, and good-humouredly let it go. But the Mouse's chance came, after all. One day the Lion got entangled in a net which had been spread for game by some hunters, and the Mouse heard and recognised his roars of anger and ran to the spot. Without more ado it set to work to gnaw the ropes with its teeth, and succeeded before long in setting the Lion free. "There!" said the Mouse, "you laughed at me when I promised I would repay you: but now you see, even a Mouse can help a Lion."

Beyond the cynical advice on waiting to insult alligators, beyond the obvious prudence of not insulting Mafia accountants or free-lance hit men — or anyone just casually — "The Lion and the Mouse" teaches the more positive but equally practical lesson of being nice to others whenever we can. As the tough-minded among the Anarchists and communitarians argued, we practice mutual aid in part because it is right to do so and because it feels good to do so: but that good feeling comes from a reliable sense of superiority as well as more admirable altruism; also, however, we practice mutual aid and should be nice to one another because the one sure thing in life is that we will eventually get into trouble.



            So, MORAL: do not insult even small alligators and help when you can. If nothing else, you never know when you'll need a favor, or from whom.

"Don't Panic the Herd" (Unnecessarily) [24 July 2014]

             In a way this post supplements my rather insistent request for some apologies from the late 20^th-century "Lefter-than-Thou" Left, this time adding in some issues of pretty much just style.

            Part of what's going on is old resentment on my side. No one on the Left ever threatened to kill me, nor even put a riot baton upside my head, but what I did get from some of my radical colleagues on the was, back when I was visible among the local 1960s peaceniks, quiet contempt for "the short little Lib with glasses" and, later, a kind of active disregard.

            You may now ignore that opening; I included it for, not full disclosure; no one can do that, but to admit some of the personal, and petty, that is always part of the political.

            The more political portion of the political that concerns me here is that some to my Left both did necessary and important work, for which they will usually take credit, but also messed up a bit, about which we hear less.

            One job they did was crucial for me: the loudest and most radical were always useful to those of us dealing with The Powers That Were (and Still Are) trying to negotiate what we hoped would be progress.

            It is always essential in such negotiations that "the Man" in his various incarnations look out the window and see and hear a mob — however small or nonexistent the crowd out there — and think, "If I do not compromise with these relatively moderate Moderates, I will have to deal with THEM outside."

            Indeed, on one occasion there was just too little rabble being roused for even the most paranoid administrator to grow concerned, so on the way to a meeting I had to take off my jacket and tie and go outside and whip up the crowd a bit myself.

            "Always have someone to your Left" if you're on the Left, to the Right if you're a conservative: either way, radicals that make you look eminently reasonable (even if the radical arguments are often more logically consistent than moderate compromises).

            And to a great extent many of us tried hard to look like moderates. 'Cause — in part, as usual — many of us growing up in the gray middle of the 20^th century grew up with the unspoken or spoken rule, "Don't panic the herd."

            Among my friends, the maxim was spoken and should have been expanded: Don't panic the herd unnecessarily, or even (unnecessarily) annoy them.

            We were quietly cocky little bastards, my friends and I, but it's hardly bragging to note that we were smart enough to figure out that our high school's student council was a "toy government" and that class president and similar faux-democratic offices weren't even that.

            And toys are to be played with, and, being wise-asses, we played.

            We saw ourselves as something cooler than kids at play, though; if we were conscious of it at all — and here we were pretty unconscious — we thought of ourselves as cowboys moving along the little dogies, or, just maybe, now and then, a lion sneaking up on the herd at the water hole.

            Anyway, we quietly, offhandedly, and in our spare time, manipulated graduation-class politics and student politics more generally — what there was of student politics at Lake View High School in the late 1950s — and figured if we couldn't be "the popular kids" we'd be the quiet manipulators.

            It was a Chicago high school, Lake View High, so such exercises were good training for adult life if we stayed in the neighborhood; and it was crucial if very basic training for my future political life in downstate Illinois, the academy, and what is now John Boehner's Congressional District. (Hint: However negative the news coverage can be of Mr. Boehner, it's better than we were used to in the Ohio 8^th CD: no phrases in the media like "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and "counts of bribery and conspiracy.")

            We called our group "Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu," from the initials of our initial motto of "Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk" and because it has a rhythm (at least with an Omega and not an Omicron) appropriate for singing, so we kind of automatically had most of a club song.

            One high point in our brief corporate life — Year Clubs are people, my friends — was when one day junior year I was sitting in the school cafeteria and a kid came up to me and asked me if I was president of Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu, and I replied "I think so." This actually wasn't a wise-ass answer since DCOSM handled transfers of authority in the tradition of the late Roman Empire, but without the violence, and I was pretty sure I had just been impeached. I finally decided I was as close to a president as we had at that moment and asked him what he wanted. He said he was running for some school or class office, and I said, "Well …?" And he asked, "Is that all right?"

            Ah, if only The Godfather had been out, and we had gotten our class rings! It hadn't and I don't think we had, so I just said, "Uh, sure" and tried to look warm and sincere and earnest and wished him luck.
            That was my personal best, but what's relevant here — I will get around to the point, honest — what's relevant here is a group achievement, and its eventual celebration.

            One day, one of my club brothers (one of the guys behind the impeachment) came up to me and asked me for a name everyone in the school would know, or think they knew. I paused and said, "Carlson. Robert Carlson — Robert A., A for Allen, but everyone calls him 'Bob'" and asked why. And my friend said that we were running him for Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council.

            I noted that I'd made up the name, and he said he knew and that that was what he wanted.

            So one of the year-club brothers wrote up a student folder for Bob and filed it appropriately, along with other subsidiary documentation. I didn't follow this part: no "Need to Know," you know, and our, well, forger was very professional about the operation (he went on to become a significant expert in encryption and had a notable run-in with the NSA before that was fashionable). Others worked on the Carlson campaign and wrote a speech for Bob to deliver at the school's election assembly.

            Getting the speech given was something of a challenge, but poor Bob came down with some medical affliction, and we got a hotshot from the current Student Council officers — a guy the speechwriter didn't like — to deliver the speech. The Council officer did an excellent job, and it looked like Bob was a shoo-in.
            And this brought us to a decision point for the, well, conspirators. Some of us wanted to get Bob elected; others noted a problem.

            Lake View did a good job running realistic elections for our toy student government, and we used actual Chicago or Cook County voting machines. Those came cheap, but there was a rental charge; and if it became clear that there'd need to be a new election based on the non-existence of the winner, or even the death or nonexistence of one of the candidates; and either way the machines would have to be rented again or there'd have to be a hand count.

            And costing the school money or making the Student Council election committee count by hand over 2000 ballots: neither was going to be taken as just good clean fun.

            So we killed Bob.

            After all, he'd been too sick to deliver his election speech, and even back before well-publicized school shootings and some poor schmuck's managing to OD on caffeine, high school students did die with sufficient frequency that the story was plausible.

            Fortunately for us, this was before the time of bringing in grief counselors for basically routine deaths; and also fortunately we were able to stop the collection of money for flowers or a contribution to … whatever-Bob-had-died-of fund — and we "pulled the string" as they used to say and whispered it around that good old Bob whom everyone knew had a terminal existential issue.

            There was an investigation, spearheaded by the current Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council, the guy who initially came up with the Carlson-for-Office idea. And we went to ground and kept our mouths shut.
            And the herd was quiet, and we sort of celebrated getting away with the prank by buying ΔΧΩΣΜ club shirts (knitted short-sleeves in blue with black letters: ugly — really ugly — but appropriate for us).

            And then someone got a bad idea, and we upped our celebration of our success by all of us wearing our shirts to school on the same day.

            Hubris yields Nemesis as the Greeks used to say, or in a more decorous formulation: Chutzpah — dumb-ass arrogance — is the pride that goeth before a pratfall.

            We made it obvious who had gotten elected to many of the offices of the toy government and such, and the herd wasn't panicked so much as the flock spotted the owls out in the daylight and mobbed the shit out of them. Less metaphorically and far less melodramatically put, we pissed off a number of our classmates, and the next election that came up — senior class officers —we were out.

            It made little difference who became class president, although the candidate elected instead of our guy made that his first step on a successful career in the cop business and then as owner of McDonald's franchises. Important for me here were lessons about the dangers of arrogance, the limits to how far people (not cattle or zebras or sheep) can be annoyed, and how something as banal as ugly short-sleeve shirts can have unanticipated effects.

            Which returns me to heavier matters.

            "The sixties" as a period in political history didn't correspond exactly to the decade of 1960 through 1969. If you need dates for it, one might say the sixties started in late 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, got caught in a backlash in 1968 with the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States, got shot down at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970, twitched a bit and then got indecently buried in an electoral landslide with the re-election of Richard M. Nixon over George McGovern in 1972. With some important ups and downs, primarily with the Watergate Scandal, the sixties were well over in crucial aspects by 1972, symbolized by Nixon's successful "Southern Strategy" for Republicans and the successful campaigns for President — to overstate — of Southern Eisenhower-Republicans by the Democrats.
            The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s f. (the Margaret Thatcher Revolution to give credit more accurately) helped "roll back" a good deal of the sixties and "the Movement."

            Why? Too big a topic for my pay grade, but let's start with "the Movement's" being far from monolithic — a good thing — and at its roots too incoherent (not a good thing). Hippies were not Radicals; the Civil Rights movement and Peace Movement overlapped but were not identical; Malcolm X was emphatically not Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Power as a movement was not Civil Rights and integration.

            And finally moving into the topic announced in my opening paragraph — the social and cultural movements of Hippies, feminists, gays, and associates (GLBT) overlapped with the other small "m" movements in American society but were far from identical, and not always in agreement on goals and tactics.

            "The personal is the political" is true indeed, but the personal also can and does compete with the more purely political, defined in traditional terms of broad-scale power and economic issues. Identity politics are politics, but they are necessarily particularistic and complicate coalition politics.

            And religious politics are always and necessarily incredibly problematic and dangerous, as can be seen by a quick look at the body counts from the 17^th-century European Wars of Religion as well as those from the older Crusades and battles within Islam.

            Short form here: Some of my colleagues on the Left weren't colleagues at all but provocateurs, and there's a history to be publicized of infiltration of Movement groups by people assigned to act offensively and provoke trouble. More, though, were sincere people who got important work done, but work with costs.

            Obviously, the wise-guys of ΔΧΩΣΜ had the right to wear our shirts to school individually and conspire to all come to school in them on the same day. It was, however, not prudent to do so. Old adolescents and young adults have the right to wear their hair as they like, and it is progress that people nowadays can wear a wide range of hair styles without worrying about what sort of political statement they're making. And that you can display tatoos and that mi-level executives can be pierced — etc., except that fights over hair and clothes and fashion are far less of a drain on the status-quo Right than on the Left, and for the serious politics of Who-Gets-What are largely a distraction.

            And the "life-style" fights of the 1960s and following much too frequently panicked the herd. Indeed even far more serious conflicts — ones with excellent results like getting acceptance of gay marriage — came with upsetting traditionalists more than prudent.

            It can be useful and often necessary to "appall the bourgeoisie," but bourgeoisie is a Frenchified way to say "middle class," and it can be a very bad tactic to appall a middle-class that must be brought into any effective alliance against the reactionary among the very rich.

            It can be galvanizing to attack any orthodoxy, including religious orthodoxy, but go back to the old image with "galvanize" and picture putting electricity through people. They may object, strongly.

            After the American Left lost the power to threaten widespread disruption — basically after Kent State and Jackson State and convulsions that followed them — it was time to cool it and avoid unnecessarily annoying the conventional.

            Plenty of annoyance is already necessary.

            So, a sensible atheist can deal with theist by mildly re-formulating the probably apocryphal assertion by Pierre-Simon Laplace, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — the God hypothesis — and then shutting up unless the theists are trying to control your behavior.

                        * Effective politics are coalition politics, and there are a lot of religious people out there who can be drawn into progressive coalitions on the basis of their/our beliefs.

                        * In the United States, there are a lot of religious people, period.

                        * Historically, going back to the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, science, and "Reason," a standard response to overstated Enlightenment and "modernism" has been calls for a return to unquestioning faith and various fundamentalisms. Hold your ground civilly, but don't encourage that return. You don't have to say the "under God" part of the pledge of allegiance — or any of the Pledge — but you can stand there quietly when others indulge the patriotic impulse.

            All Americans of any, all, and every sexual orientation can cool it with Public Displays of Affection when PDA means public fondling.

            Having established the right to decorate one's body however one pleases, in public cover up anything overly outrageous — and do not think that making an artwork of your body is some sort of significant contribution to a just society.

            And so forth.

            The "sixties" in one sense lasted maybe five years, and after that it's been largely backlash. Most of that backlash was and remains inevitable; those of us Left of center, should not add to it.

            Back in high school, Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu had the excuse of inexperience in unnecessarily goading our classmates. Older folk have no excuse. Unless it is really necessary, do not panic the herd.

            Unless you have a mob at your back — or your opponents imagine one — civility and restraint are always good options in dealing with people who just might give you what you want.

            You don't have to love your enemies or even your neighbors or "the stranger who resides with you" as on alien in or midst — not unless you Believe. Still, you can be nice to them, where possible, and, prudently, avoid unnecessarily throwing them into a panic, or a snit.

            Pranking people and arguing with them is fun; but it's better to deal with them so they'll give you their aid.