STEPHANIE SALTER: Remember, when you assume, you make a donkey of U and Me

By Stephanie Salter
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE March 29, 2008 08:17 pm

— One of the primary tenets of Don Miguel Ruiz’s indispensable book, “The Four Agreements,” is “Don’t make assumptions.” Filling in the blanks with speculation, the physician-philosopher warns, almost always leads to this: “We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.”
I bring this up because I’ve been experiencing a higher-than-average volume of assuming from people who have never met me. Reader people. Some are from around here, others have discovered me online — apparently when their Internet content flag flapped at the words “Hillary Clinton.”
What these folks have assumed is that I’m voting for the senator from New York in Indiana’s May 6 presidential primary. This is pretty amazing because I, the person who will do the voting, have not decided which Democratic candidate I will choose.
(I do know it won’t be John McCain. Not because he’s a Republican, but because (1) he has made military victory in Iraq a priority, (2) he has backed away from his admirable stand against the state-sanctioned display of the Confederate flag and the divisiveness of Christian hate preaching, (3) he has said he would nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of John Roberts and Samuel Alito and (4) he opposes access to safe, legal abortion.)
I have many questions and reservations to resolve about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The former’s He-wouldn’t-be-my-pastor remark this week about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright earned her several demerits in my book. Although it is another topic for another day, my general feeling about the Wright uproar can be found in a great Salon.com essay by Gary Kamiya, who observes that Wright is not the real problem.
“What the whole episode reveals is how narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country,” Kamiya wrote.
So, why do strangers assume I’ve pledged my vote to Sen. Clinton? Because I have written a handful of columns in which I did not denounce her.
I have raised questions about the role of sexism in this presidential campaign, reviewed some of the astounding literature that is being cranked out by the fear-Hillary crowd and, recently, used Clinton’s behavior during a visit to Terre Haute as counter-evidence to the popular national rap on her as a cold, calculating bitch.
(Question that noun? Do a Google search with her name and “bitch” in it: 412,000 results.)
In response, I have received numerous assuming messages. A sample excerpt follows — verbatim, including ellipses. The man, who signed himself “A … rigid thinking engineer,” said he’s from out of state.
“Your fawning twenty-six paragraph descriptions of Hillary Clinton is nothing short of a complete endorsement of her as a person. Insomuch as the politics separating her and Sen. Obama are nil, your love-fest of an article is a political article. Indeed, such a over-the-top bias in any article concerning any candidate actively running for office is political.
“This, my sweet but misguided modern ‘journalist’, falls short of the traditional liberal press ethos. I mean liberal in its true sense, not the liberalism of the current Angry Left. (And aren’t they just so cute … !!)
“So, your UC-Berkeley or UNC or Amerhest other such inspired journalism school may have blown by that afternoon where ‘ethics’ was taught, but nonetheless, there is supposed to be an ethical basis of that thing, objectivity.
Oh, look, a circular argument. Please say that you recognize that. …?”
Assumption city. Not only did the e-mailer assume my “complete endorsement” of Clinton “as a person,” he assumed I was a news reporter, that I had attended a journalism school, that it was some place like Berkeley, the University of North Carolina or (I think) Amherst, where an afternoon of ethics had been blown by.
First, despite the low regard in which mainstream journalism is held, news reporters do not write anything as obviously subjective as the opinion column I wrote about Clinton’s visit. (Read Sue Loughlin’s page-one coverage for a news story.)
Second, I went to Purdue, which has no journalism school but a lot of engineers, rigid thinking and otherwise. It barely offered a journalism major when I was pursuing my humanities degree there in 1967-1971.
Journalism ethics were included in courses on libel law, news writing, editing and the history of the American newspaper.
At least the e-mailer confined himself to being patronizing and insulting (a link to the definition of “objective” was included “for ease”). A few months ago, a column I wrote about Clinton elicited several e-mails and four or five voicemails that ran as long as seven minutes, all from the same individual.
That man felt compelled to reveal many of the ugly, hidden “truths” about Sen. Clinton that I must not, he assumed, know.
One example: Chelsea Clinton probably is the child of Arkansas attorney and former Clinton family pal, Webb Hubbell. You can tell by the shape of her mouth, the man explained.
Uh, right.
As I said, all of this has been excellent practice for following Don Miguel Ruiz’s advice against assuming.
It is also a good workout for one of the other tenets of “The Four Agreements,” which is, “Don’t Take Anything Personally.”
Good or bad, Ruiz writes, what people say about you or do to you isn’t about you, it’s about them.
I know that is true. I know that a man who doesn’t even live in Indiana, who has never sent me a single e-mail on any other subject, but feels free to lecture me like a kindergartner and call me “my sweet but misguided ‘modern’ journalist,” is saying everything about himself and zero about me.
And if I could answer the man back with my most honest and distilled response, the two-word instruction as to what he should do to himself would be about me, not him. Alas, it also would violate another of Ruiz’s tenets: “Be Impeccable with Your Word.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.