What’s up with all the crazy, embarrassing, public outbursts recently? Foot-in-mouth disease seems to have replaced swine flu as the epidemic du jour, and politicians, athletes and celebrities are dropping like flies.
We had just about gotten over, or at least gotten used to, Gov. Sanford’s tortuous quest to snag a gig on “The Jerry Springer Show” when along came Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina congressman who, in a moment of impassioned insanity, called the president a liar in front of millions of primetime T.V. viewers.
No matter how many folks at home were screaming the same thing at their T.V.s, belting it out right there in the Senate chambers was more than a teensy faux pas.
Thanks to Sanford and Wilson, columnists are now resurrecting the old joke that South Carolina is “too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum.”
Perhaps “Smiling Faces. Beautiful Places.” has given way to “Loose Lips. Embarrassing Slips.”
But South Carolinians certainly haven’t cornered the market on humiliating sound bites.
Tennis superstar Serena Williams went uncharacteristically berserk in the semifinals of the U.S. Open, screaming obscenities and threatening a line judge. I’m sure she was ticked because she was losing to a player who had just come out of retirement. Perhaps her cell phone was on the fritz and she was suffering “Twitter withdrawal”; maybe her hormones reached critical mass. Whatever the reason, Serena’s nasty tirade cost her the match, a boatload of money, and more importantly, the respect of millions.
Then there was rapper Kanye West’s unbelievably tacky sabotage of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards. (No, church people, I wasn’t watching the MTV Video Music Awards, but a clip of this incident aired everywhere in TV land for days.) As Swift received her award and launched into her speech, West grabbed the mike and essentially said that another artist’s video was better. Even for a rap artist, West’s behavior was over the top.
When our mouths start racing that far ahead of our brains, it’s time to pull off the verbal highway and turn off the engine before we crash and burn.
There’s a tongue-in-cheek maxim that says, “If you can’t be a good example, be a terrible warning.” Most sane people don’t plan to end up as a “terrible warning,” but all it takes is one big- league moment of misplaced passion and a few rash words.
Thankfully, my moments of social retardation haven’t been captured on film to become fodder for the masses on youtube.com. But I’ve had a few meltdowns, and I’ll wager you have, too.
Have you ever said too much, too little, something you didn’t really mean to say, something that made you feel queasy mere seconds after it snuck out of your mouth?
I have. I do. I wish I didn’t. I wish I wouldn’t. I always vow not to again.
James 3:5 in The Message paraphrase of the Bible says, “It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that.”
Boy howdy, can it ever.
Another metaphor that works for me is this: The words we speak are like tiny bits of confetti blown by a giant fan. Once they fly out of our mouths, there’s no gathering them back in.
Sanford, Wilson, Williams and West wish that weren’t true, but it is. Let’s learn from their mistakes, and from our own.