CRITICAL OLD PEOPLE [F, 1-31-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—CRITICAL OLD PEOPLE [F, 1-31-25]

 

Old people like to help younger people learn the truth, by criticizing them for not having the truth already.

There was a campus minister at my university who liked correcting people. I’ll call him Floyd. I didn’t go to many campus ministry programs, because I was already preaching at three little churches, but I was madly in love with the secretary of the student cabinet [officers] of that campus ministry, so I hung around the building whenever I thought she might be there. Thus, even I did not escape Floyd’s corrections.

I think he saw saving people from their mistakes as part of his ministry. That is not how others saw it. They just saw a guy who liked to find fault.

Correcting a factual mistake might actually be helpful to the person corrected. For instance, if I thought that Illinois Wesleyan U is in Indiana, I could be saved some travel problems if someone corrected me.

I had gone to chapel once at ILWU to hear a well-known high-ranking church guy from NYC. But he called Chaplain Bill White just before chapel time to say he wasn’t going to make it. He was calling from Bloomington, Indiana to say he had flown there instead of to Bloomington, Illinois. Why in the world he thought Illinois Wesleyan was in Bloomington, Indiana he never explained. Some correction would have benefited him.

But Floyd didn’t really correct you, even your factual mistakes, in a useful manner. Instead, he belittled you for not already having the correct knowledge. He would have said, “What? You thought IWU was in IN? Where did you go to school?”

Correcting others for matters of opinion is even more problematic. “The trees are pretty,” some student might say. Floyd would reply, “Maybe to you they are, but to someone who has just lost a loved one to a gruesome death, nothing is pretty, and it’s an insult to them to say the trees are pretty.”

People just stopped talking to him, or in front of him.

Nobody really likes being corrected. As Mark Twain said, “I love learning, but I hate being taught.” Yet old people seem to think that since we acquired so much knowledge over our many years, we should impart it whether folks want it or not. Especially, we should correct their mistakes so they don’t make them again.

Being corrected is belittling. Young people lump it into a category called “judgy.”

Correcting a person’s factual mistakes can be helpful, to keep them from looking stupid in front of others. But there is a limit to how helpful that might be. If you split an infinitive, I could correct your grammar, but hardly anybody would care, and you probably wouldn’t, either.

In my retirement, I served as a sort of unofficial, unpaid Assistant District Superintendent. Our DS sent me out to little churches to hear new preachers and help them learn to preach better. I was glad to do so, but I told him, and them, that I would report to him only the things they did well. I saw my job not as correcting mistakes, but as building on their good points.

The job of old people is to help young people get better at living. Criticism rarely, if ever, does that. Affirmation of what we’re already doing okay at, I think, is what works best. [And don’t even think about correcting my placement of “at” in that sentence.]

John Robert McFarland

January of 2025 is over. It has certainly been a momentous month. I pray that your new month of February will be a good one.