Hubris of the self-righteous

Poorer, sleepier, happier. I have arrived in Florida. So far I've read about 150 pages worth of material on land usage, and as ready as I feel for this presentation, I have a lot more to prep. I don't even know how to pronounce the names of half of the cities I'll be talking about, not to mention the communities. (Jur. Kakwa. Yei. Malakal.) Thank goodness I have intelligent people supporting me in this project, and I can back up my assertions with strong research.

I walked into the hotel lobby today to find a woman from the UK chatting up the hotel attendant. "Are you going to the conference, too?" she asks. I say yes. "Will you be speaking, or simply attending?" I tell her I'll be speaking. "Oh. What will you be speaking on?" I tell her land use issues, and fail to elaborate because the three hours of sleep I got last night make it difficult to form coherent sentences. She blinks. And then she begins her rant about academics.

"I am not here to speak," she says. "I am here to do some fund raising. Do you go to a school? You will start a fund raising group for us. We help children in Darfur. We are really doing something, not just talking about land-use issues."

Uh-huh. While I am curious to know about the children of the Fur, I have to bite my tongue to avoid verbally upbraiding this woman. Hostility is no way to make friends, and academics are important to any humanitarian recovery process, too. I could explain to her that these silly "land-use issues" that I will be talking about have embroiled Sudan in civil war for forty years, disenfranchise whole communities of people, result in epidemics of violence and water-borne disease, and reflect the very source of contention in Darfur. I could tell her, if we can't make peace work in the South, how are we supposed to make peace work in the North? I could say that I am taking care of children, after my own fashion, and that I have seen my own share of scattered families and destroyed villages, too -- maybe not the quantity she has, if she works in Sudan, but certainly on a more personal level.

But I swallow my pride and nod. I promise to visit her information booth, tomorrow morning. And I will; I will go listen to what she has to say. Because I am going to have to learn to manage my own sense of self-importance, and deal with others who have inflated egos, too. That's just how the world works, and I want to support every effort that I can, if only by listening.

Hm. I expect more of this to come up in my career. A lot more. I mean, look, I even made that crack about saving the world, this morning. Please tell me if that kind of humor becomes crude. Splinter in your neighbor's eye, log in your own, and all ...