Dancing with the Girl Who Brung Ya: Clinging to Civility When the Culture Demands Otherwise

"Dance with the girl that brung ya."

Summer 1982. I am on my family's ranch, sitting behind the wheel of a 1965 Ford F-100 pickup. I am 15. Marshall, our ranchman, sits beside me. He is teaching me to drive.

The shift is four-on-the-floor,and the clutch is sticky, and I stall every time I try to get from first to second. We are hitching and jerking along the dirt road, and I am frustrated.

Marshall wants country music on the AM radio as he teaches. The Oak Ridge Boys sing, "Elvira," and Marshall offers a passable bass.

I stall the truck again. "You're fine, Hugo. Keep dancing with the girl that brung ya."

He means I should remember what he's taught me, stick with the tools I have been given. I'm not doing it wrong, I just don't have the hang of the right just yet.

The Oak Ridge boys keep singing, and I keep trying to keep my feet dancing, left rising off the clutch, right pressing the gas.

Stall. Stall. Go. Second, then third! "Back it on down, son."

Stall.

Eventually, it comes together, as it always does, as it did a century earlier when another ranchman might have taught my great-great-grandfather to drive a mule team.

We live in a most unsettling time. Some of my friends are saying that maybe, given the exigencies of COVID, or January 6, or whatever the outrage that has you frantic this morning, we need to abandon our old values. Now is maybe not the time to stand up for free speech, now is maybe the time to rethink non-violence, now is the time to abandon the self-imposed constraints of manners. Fight fire with fire! Follow women into restrooms and shout at them in the stalls! Fire anti-vaxxers from their jobs and cut off their benefits; starve them and mock them until they come to their senses!

Civility isn’t civilized; it’s complicity with injustice. Or so you may have started to think.

(As an aside, I note that my friends on the left think folks on the right fight dirty, while we liberals are too constrained by niceties. I guarantee you many of my conservative friends have exactly the same lament. In 2021, everyone imagines the other side has become feral, while their own team is unduly constrained by outmoded social conventions. There’s a cottage industry producing predictable essays imploring their own team to “take the proverbial gloves off” at long last.)

Here’s the point: We are who we are not just because of what we believe, but because of how we fight for what we believe. Means and ends must always be congruent. The tools we use determine the outcomes we get.

Stress and fear are not a sign we need to make a change. More than ever, in this frightening and exhausting season, it’s time to "dance with the girl that brung ya," and double down on what we already know is right: kindness, compassion, civility, pluralism, tolerance, and a ceaseless willingness to engage and listen. That’s what it means to be a liberal. It’s one thing to be filled with a fierce sense of urgency, quite another to let one’s perception of urgency cause you to become vicious.

I try and bring the old lessons with me to my work at Trader Joe’s, every dang day, no matter the provocation. And if you’re a frontline grocery worker in 2021, with ever-shifting public health mandates and chronic supply shortages, trust me, there are plenty of provocations!

This season is tough and scary. This season is not a reason to alter who it is we are.

I’m gonna keep dancin’ with the girl who done brung me.

And I sure wish I could drive a 1965 Ford F-100 one more time.