Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [19]
Of course, it isn’t just the media that gorge themselves on “trifling conversation.” Gossip is the vernacular of the modern office; it’s what binds people of disparate cultures and races.
Given Franklin’s choice for Virtue No. 2, it must have been no different in colonial America. I bet Franklin had a proclivity for it. He was, after all, a journalist. He acknowledged a habitude of “prattling, punning and joking.” Ben and I may not share many qualities, but there is common ground here. Trifling conversations are us.
At some point, however, Ben understood that “in conversation it (knowledge) was obtained rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue.” So that, at least in the early going, was my goal for this virtue: no gossiping; no prattling, punning, or joking; more listening than talking. Indeed, I decided to speak only well of my fellow travelers. Given that, as a prosecutor, I am paid to describe the nefarious, salacious, and titillating details of people’s lives, this had the potential to be a tough week.
I lasted about two hours.
Let There Be Gossip
I barely had time to wipe the sleep from my eyes and address Powerful Goodness before I was slapping the virtue out of Silence.
On Day 1, I rose with the best of intentions. I had firmly set about to avoid all gossip—to speak only when it was a benefit to me or others. I managed to rise, do the Powerful Goodness thing, wish good tidings upon my family, and make it all the way to work without transgression. That, however, was as far as I got.
My undoing was habit. The very power that Franklin sought to harness pulled me into its awful maw and consumed whole my good intentions. So I blame habit . . . and my work colleagues. They are good and decent people (as I hope I am). Until this virtue was thrust upon me, I would not have thought of them as trifling conversationalists. (My boss’s nickname among the criminal defense lawyers is the Cobra. He is hardly the sort to prattle or pun.) These are generally serious people engaged in serious work. That is, except for first thing in the morning.
This is where habit creeps in. Each morning is the same. Like salmon swimming back to the river of their birth, we end up in my boss’s office to, well, engage in trifling conversation. We discuss the previous night’s events, the day ahead of us, and the goings-on in the world. We speak of our own lives and those of others. In short, we gossip. It was into this mix that I took my good intentions and poor record on Silence.
Of course, I wasn’t wading into this river without knowledge of the current. I knew what awaited. I had possessed an unfounded optimism that I could resist.
Like a journeyman prizefighter, I was smart in the early rounds. I watched for snippets of gossip among our conversation. When I saw them coming, I sidestepped, backpeddled, bobbed, and weaved. And like that journeyman prizefighter, my early success was my undoing. “This isn’t so hard,” I thought, and I dropped my guard.
“Oh,” I thought to myself as we spoke of someone not present, “that was gossip.” Like an old high school classmate passing on a busy sidewalk, I recognized the gossip as it went by, but by the time I was ready to shout it down, it was gone. Oh well, what’s one slip? Then it happened again—a story about a local lawyer. Damn, I cursed myself for not objecting to the usual backbiting. I needed to up my game. Just as I was thinking of how I would deal with the next incident, one of my coworkers asked me a question about someone, a police officer, and before I could stop myself, I was the gossiper. Metaphorically, I clasped a hand over my mouth. I was no longer just an accomplice; now I was Silence’s Enemy No. 1.
I had not even made it through the morning. I started to remember Temperance fondly.