meddling

in the world of speeches and proclamations, my guess is that graduations rate pretty low. can you remember anything from your graduation speeches? i don't even remember who gave speeches at my high school graduation. i do remember that one of the george bushes--i can't remember which--gave some kind of speech, or got some kind of award, at my graduate school graduation (with quite a bit of booing). and i really don't remember much from my college graduation speeches other than the guest of honor was ted koppel, whose daughter, andrea, was a classmate. in fact, my first meal at college was shared with the koppel family, which when combined with the final word from ted at graduation formed a nice kind of koppel frame to my college education. the one thing i do remember was spoken by our college president, olin robison. i don't remember any of the rest of what he said, but this one thing stood out for me: paraphrasing, he said, as part of a long list of do's and dont's: "don't meddle with people's emotions." he spoke of this activity as one of the lowest and most destructive of all human traits. i have often asked myself when in difficult and ego-bruising situations whether i am toying with someone else's emotional ground. it's often difficult to tell, the boundaries get blurred. other times, it's blatant, when for example, someone communicates misleading information with the intent to harm or disrupt, usually in the form of gossip, sometimes in even harder forms, such as photographs or copied emails. all of it seems aimed at protecting the gossip's own ego, sheltering them from some kind of pain. i've done it. i'd guess most people have done it. i think i agree with olin robison that it's not healthy. in my own experience, it only comes back to haunt, and usually in strange and undetectable ways--a slight depression, a lingering pain, a reluctance to engage, a loss of enthusiasm, a lack of intimacy, the building of walls. it may simply boil down to love over hate, for when one truly loves there is no fear and no need to protect.