One of the Four Agreements is to not take things personally, and I try to live by that. Sometimes it’s hard, especially if you have a personal confrontation with someone and it really feels personal. But it also seems like some people simply search for things to get angry about, making the most general statements as personal as they can so they can simply take offense.

A loved one and I parted “Facebook friend status” over such an act. She knows I homeschool and that I have a problem with schools in general—not individual teachers per se, but the entire history of education, its purpose, and the way it is used to control and manufacture same-minded people. She was not in Prussia at the time of its inception; her parents’ parents’ parents were not even born yet. Yet, she took offense because she is a teacher, and rather than fight with her and further offend her—when every single one of my opinions and posts is likely to do so—I de-friended her. My mother suggested I do it to keep peace in the family, and now I wish I had not, since it is really up to her to not view my “offensive” material, not for me to police her own viewing.

Today, I saw that I was not alone in offending her. A young cousin who is graduating remarked how much she hated her school and that her child will never be attending the school. My other relative commented how this offended her because she’s a teacher—even though the statement had nothing to do with her! She could have been talking about the administration, or drug problems within the area, or other teachers who abused her (there are plenty who do that), or any number of things. My relative was not involved in any way (and I have never seen her comment on any other of this young woman’s posts, by the way—only this so-called offensive one), but felt she had to complain about how offensive it was that her own niece had had a bad experience.

That’s like me being offended because someone doesn’t like someone else’s blog that happens to be completely unrelated to mine, or because Michelle Bachmann, also a homeschooler, is a dingbat. Yeah, I’m not those people, so I’m not offended. Even if it were directed at me, other people’s opinions of me are none of my business; my own is what matters. But that is another post!

She did not even bother to support her niece in her pain; she felt she could connect with unknown teachers in the same profession rather than her own flesh and blood. You know what we do where I come from when a loved one has a bad experience? We stand up for them. We support them. Even if we disagree, we are on their side, because that’s what you do when you love someone.