Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action
Torrey Orton
Nov.16, 2011


A moment in the FCC defence frontline…


I lost it…my temper that is! About 8:30 last Wednesday morning I looked down the footpath towards the city just in time to see a couple coming along, the woman crying uncontrollably; her partner just behind her and a protestor ( "Purple Shirt" as she was called in TheAGE four days later) looking the woman in the face, seeing her crying and gesturing her away, and continuing to follow her towards the clinic gate with the standard "Save your little baby; you'll be a good mother" mantra beating on her back. As she almost always does to every patient. A perfect example of harassment of a visibly vulnerable patient.


The keyword is harassment – a perception of being persistently, repeatedly, verbally and visually attacked by another. I harassed back, stepping up to her (all 191cm/105kg to her pudgy 155cm) and pointing out as I came from 3 metres away "that is harassment; she was crying all the way and you saw her and continued anyway…" I can't remember how it ended but the whole sequence from go to no was 15 seconds. I became aware that I had been sucked in by her offense…enraged briefly, close to physical assault… and almost as the awareness arrived I was turning back from the protestor to see her colleague approaching…


In talking to the protest leader, David Forster, seconds after the event (which had drawn him towards me as if he were going to defend the harasser from me) I pointed out that she had harassed the patient and knew it, knew that the patient was already crying, had said no and been followed up by her partner in doing so. He started to run the Helpers of God's Precious Infants party line on the evil things done behind the clinic walls (which justifies their offer of "help" over any other consideration) until I interrupted with these facts. David accepts that this is harassment, knowing as he does that another male protestor has clearly drawn back from patients who arrive in tears. I also wondered to him: "Isn't harassing the weak unchristian?" to which he nodded assent with the scrunched look of a logically forced agreement.


Charles thought the elapsed time between my seeing the harassment and taking action was a couple of minutes…I thought a few seconds. Charles and the guard, Edward, had seen the same scene unfold, the guard more fully because he had noticed them coming before they got to the protestor…that the woman waited for her husband to catch up and was already crying, he having been completing a mobile call. TheAGE columnist Suzy Freeman-Greene's version appears here. It was built out of her own perceptions, and some of our three, gathered at the moment described.


I am surprised to re-learn (assuming I ever did really learn this) how unreliable my perception of live events can be, how open to multiple interpretations; how filled with material lacunae such that a report of the event would be more holes than whole. My contribution sprang from my interpretation of harassment, amplified by my lifetime revulsion at any bullying, but especially of the weak. I was perhaps able to pull back from my spring by a borderline awareness that I was about to bully the bully ("Purple Shirt") and so earn a placeholder status in my own ethical bestiary.


How easy it is for my reason to fly off in a rage where my righteousness rules the moment to moment equation of time seeking justification in worthy action. I'm speaking only of myself in this accusation. If it fits, feel free to join it.