There are so many great English phrases, but John Faithful Hamer tells us why these are his three favorite.
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1. I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS
Think about that moment in X-Men Origins(2009) when Wolverine refuses to participate in the massacre of innocent civilians in Nigeria. What does he say? “I didn’t sign up for this.”
Think about that moment in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) when CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy decides to leak all of the Blackbriar files to the media. What does she say? “I didn’t sign up for this.”
It’s a beautiful phrase which signals that magical moment when a person decides to do the right thing.
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Think about that moment in Clear and Present Danger(1994) when Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) decides to blow the whistle on the President’s covert war in Latin America. What does he say? “I didn’t sign up for this.”
Think about that moment in Avatar (2009) when Trudy Chacon refuses to open fire on the native people of Pandora. What does she say? “I didn’t sign up for this shit!”
When we hear someone say “I didn’t sign up for this” it ignites our moral emotions and we experience something profoundly physiological, something which the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has dubbed “elevation”. You get chills, a tingling sensation; your chest expands, as if with fresh air; and your eyes well up with tears. “I didn’t sign up for this”—it’s a beautiful phrase which signals that delightful moment when an individual decides to stop hiding behind the modern machine and take responsibility for their actions—viz., it signals that magical moment when a person decides to do the right thing.
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2. I FORGIVE YOU
The longer you’ve been with someone, the more times you’ve let them down, hurt them, said stupid shit, and, in a way, incurred debts to them. Perhaps that’s why people who’ve been together for a long time can fight so spectacularly: because they’re not just fighting about what happened yesterday, or last week; they’re fighting about what happened last year, or last decade. Indeed, I’ve heard some couples bring up shit that happened in the 1990s in fights! As you might expect, this makes their fights far more intense than they ought to be.
Why not forgive the debts, get over it, stop bringing up old shit, and move on?
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When this dynamic is ramped up to the group level, you’ve got people screaming and yelling about stuff that happened 400 years ago as if it happened yesterday; you’ve got programs of ethnic cleansing predicated on wrongs that were supposedly perpetrated by the ancestors of your victims; and you’ve got young adults in developing countries crushed by national debts that were incurred by corrupt politicians decades before they were born. Alas, I propose that we forgive it all!
What could be more beautiful than a periodic forgetting of debts? It could renew our relationships, our economy, our international relations? How often do we see people split up and remarry simply because the weight of resentment on their shoulders proves too heavy to bear? They start off fresh with a new partner (also recently divorced) and proceed—slowly but surely—to build up a similarly substantial weight of resentment, which, in time, will necessitate another divorce, and another remarriage. But why not break this cycle? Why not forgive the debts, get over it, stop bringing up old shit, and move on?
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3. THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I
We’re all here today because of mistakes we didn’t pay for; and, for that very reason, we should be far more forgiving of those who are forced by Fortuna to pay for their mistakes. We’ve all dodged a thousand bullets to get to where we are today. And if we’re around next year, it’ll be because we dodged dozens more. The great English Reformer John Bradford saw this with unusual clarity. That’s why he mouthed these words to himself so often: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
This article was originally published on Committing Sociology.
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Not my circus, not my monkeys
I am rich in proportion to the things I leave alone
Yesterday was the only easy day.
Those get me through it