On Exes and Patriots

When I meet people who tell me — vividly, and at times with real relish — what an a**hole their former (or even current) employer or ex-partner is, I quietly switch into high-alert mode. Here’s why:

1) people often attract their own kind;

2) at some point, tying their life to that person or that company was their own conscious choice — and a choice like that usually reflects their values. Even if it turned out to be the wrong one, you can criticize it in a far more constructive way.

Of course, life is life, and not every relationship ends on a high note — but surely there was a lot of good in it too!

When someone has kept warm relations with all their former partners — or at least makes a point of showing it — that looks far more promising to me. For me personally, it’s a serious question of honor and dignity.

The same goes for how a person treats their country…

I know people who left Russia for good, or for a while, and others who still live there but have built a fiercely negative, radical stance toward their historical homeland. And yet, from my own experience, almost every successful foreigner I’ve met around the world is a fierce patriot! Even though their own contribution to their prosperity was substantial, they’re full of gratitude to the country where they made it — and to its people — no matter what: not the hardships they lived through, not the ideology, not the cases of injustice.

If you start, in their presence, telling them how much you hate the country where you spent most of your life — and, on top of that, made your money — they probably won’t say anything to your face. But they will certainly ask themselves a few questions:

— what will you say about us if our paths ever diverge?

— what did the country do to you, personally, that was so terrible you’d form an opinion like that?

— what would you say about their country, if you’d lived there and left, given that perfect places don’t exist — every one has its pluses and minuses?

Patriotism shows up especially vividly in the Arab countries, for instance. Try telling a citizen of, say, the UAE — half as a jab — that his country has an authoritarian regime, official censorship, and total surveillance, and watch his reaction.

Trying to push someone else’s agenda on a person is a lot like deliberately running down their ex, just to see how they’ll react. If everyone keeps imposing their worldview on us, and we keep giving in to it, will those people still respect us as individuals with an identity of our own? Will we still see ourselves that way?

Here’s to kindness — and a mind of our own! 😎