Being kind, when others won't

I'm not always the kindest person, though I try. I guess I have to try harder, because there are some people that I find it hard to show unconditional caring for, no matter what the circumstances.

Today, however, I tried. There's a woman who is a frequent reader of my newspaper. She often finds the need to take us to task when she finds a grammatical error in the paper or something like that. The other day, she sent me a note saying she had found the same mistake in the paper twice in a week -- the use of the wrong form of a word.

We spent a day exchanging emails, with me basically saying that as a journalist we deal with hundreds and thousands of words each day and that we were human beings bound to make a mistake now and then. I've written at least two stories where I've gotten the entire person's first and last name wrong, for example, and I lived to see the sun come up the next day.

So I invited this woman to lunch with me. We ate at this deli, and she seemed fascinated by the way the newspaper worked. It should be noted that this woman is often persona non grata when she calls the newsroom, just because people aren't gonna like what she has to say. I even said her complaints were "legendary."

Anyway, I talked with her about how many different kinds of things we do as journalists -- that it wasn't just sitting there and typing all day, like a stenographer. It actually invovles more than just reporting. We're blogging, posting live updates to the Web site, taking photos, shooting video, and when deadline approaches, actually writing the stories that will appear in the next day's paper. In between, we're dealing with phone calls and emails from the outside public, meeting with sources, interviewing, etc. So even if you see one story from me in the paper, it still means we're doing a whole lot more.

This woman was fascinated by our job. She said she'd like to visit the paper some day. I encouraged her to do it. She said she was scared, that people might not accept her.

The thing is, when I returned to the newsroom, people rolled their eyes at me for even meeting with this woman. They were as unkindly to her as she had apparently been to them in some of the notes she sent.

Honestly, my first reaction was to look to the heavens and tell Heavenly Father that these people did not know who they were spitting vitriol at. They'd never even tried to meet her! Yet I took it upon myself to reach out and see her. She wasn't a woman with horns and fangs: she was a middle-aged, slightly overweight woman dressed in a blouse and black slacks. She seemed like she genuinely cared about our job, and even about me -- an almost middle-aged balding man with love handles. This wasn't Khruschev-Eisenhower, either. It was just two people who seemed equally curious about each other.

Sometimes journalism is fairly petty, and people forget that we're humans first, and "journalist" falls about 10th on the list of importance.

I'm not perfect, but I certainly don't want to judge people I haven't met. I'm glad I didn't do it this time.