28: Another Boring Lecture

I'm supposed to write about a boring experience, but make it sound interesting. This is kind of intriguing and more than a little challenging.

The man at the lectern had some title, but I don't think anybody but he really cared what it was. He's done this speech a million times (it seems like a hundred thousand of them to me), but I still don't know his name, and it was just on the screen a minute ago. He's flipping through powerpoint slides, trying to make interesting what nearly everyone in the room thought was tedious. We didn't want to be there, and he didn't want to be there. It was the annual Equal Employment training. Everybody gets it. Nobody wants it.

"It is forbidden," the man intones, "to make racist or ethnic jokes in the workplace. You will be fired if you use race as a criterion for hiring, firing, or promotion."

The thing is, that somewhere under the speaker's monotone, there is the sound of a black man no one heard crying out at the injustice at a world where he is treated like an animal, even if he is an animal who can vote. It is the sound of the family mourning the loss of their son to a lynch mob, a sound kept quiet because it is not wise to be heard. Somehow, through the work of brave men of all races, the sound has been heard, and layered under the monotone or a group of men and women for whom such treatment is so obviously wrong that to talk of it is boring.

"Sexual harassment can take many forms," the man says. "It need not be an exchange of sexual favors for a promotion or such. It might be lewd comments, uninvited touching, demeaning photos posted in the workspace."

And under these words are the futile, desperate cries of the woman who felt she had to play along to get ahead, of the woman who was constantly asked to trade her dignity for her career, of the woman who started to feel that she could not be as valuable as the men. Words few heard, some laughed at, and no one paid attention to, until they wove their way into the colorless voice of the man warning people about things any moron would know, things that not too long ago, nobody knew.

It's a great thing that for most people, equal opportunity lectures are boring.

There are still racists and louts who think that it's OK to treat Hispanic people the way their grandfather did, who think random women enjoy being pinched by them, who cling for dear life to the idea that they are better than anyone who doesn't look like them.

Thank the Holy Spirit, there seem to be fewer of them now.

Maybe if there were none of them, we'd all be able to avoid another boring lecture.

Copyright 2012. Timothy H. Ruppel. All rights reserved.

This work by Timothy H. Ruppel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.