Running our society demands a lot of boring jobs. And who does them? Exotic rock stars? Flamboyant politicians? Glib TV-talk-show hosts? No, it’s the accountants. store managers, computer programmers, the middle ranks at banks and public utilities. Very often these people are BMCWM.
Our path to being boring probably began when men in power decided to create a smoke screen of normalcy to hide the noxious things they were doing. They paid men who resembled them to see to it that things worked. These were the first middle managers, and from them the middle class was born and its allegiance to those in power.
We BMCWM have become society’s nit-pickers. One of our weaknesses is for the data of efficiency–how to improve gas mileage or produce one more widget per hour–things nobody else frets about and doesn’t want to hear about at a dinner table. We’ve written a mountain of regulations to make society more orderly and, many would say, more complicated. We staff schools of law, businesses, government posts, etc., to teach and protect our regulations and our incomes. Not everybody has the endurance to do these things. Not everyone can study with real interest a balance sheet or an appliance-maintenance agreement Many psyches are too fragile to accept yawns in the face, glazed stares, a limp “Oh, that’s interesting.”
We BMCWM have evolved into purely rational, sometimes insensitive and usually hesitant creatures. The rest of you are free to be outlandish and spontaneous since, thanks to us, no matter what you do, your mail will arrive, your credit cards will work and you can get your washing machine fixed after using it to mix margaritas for your block party. But we BMCWM don’t do daring things-not even kiss the woman of our choice in the canned-goods aisle at the grocery–because they aren’t sensible.
BMCWM also don’t have causes. It’s not that we don’t care about anything. We want the best for our families. That’s why we spend so much time worrying about security, stability and resale values. Thanks to us you have IRAs and residential communities of symmetrical gray houses accruing value. But a fire-in-the-gut desire to right wrongs is foreign to us. If you want to discuss the role of CDs in your investment portfolio, we’re your man. But if you urge us to storm the walls of poverty or ignorance, we’ll argue that-resources given to the downtrodden are squandered. If you need advice about chemical lawn treatments, we’re here for you. But if you want to mobilize us against attacks on the environment, we’ll explain how life has trade-offs between costs and benefits. If you want to interpret annualized net rates of return for mutual funds, we’ll help. But if you want us to campaign against a regressive tax structure, we’ll argue that we all gain by preserving capital in the hands of those who know how to manage it.
It’s not that causes aren’t worthy. It’s that we’re passion impaired. When you spend eight or 10 hours a day getting paid for doing boring things, you not only get a lot of practice being boring, you come to prefer being boring because its so much safer than passion and intensity.
The problems: We BMCWM have been conditioned to accept and even like things the way they are. Oh, we see the problems-declining education, crime and drugs, etc., etc. But we assume that the basic system is OK. After all, it’s been good to us. And our fix-it mentality tells us that we need merely to train others in our ways. If kids just scent more time in school. if minorities set aside their cultural pasts, if women concentrated on what they do best, if we built more prisons and arrested more pushers–if we did these things, all would be fine. Our solutions are familiar, obvious, and rational.
But it’s not easy for a BMCWM to open a dialogue. If I try to discuss issues of race and feminism–admittedly in bumbling ways–I hear comments such as, “You can’t understand because you’re not one of us,” or, “It’s well-to-do white men like you who run the country and cause our problems.”
But one of the problems is that BMCWM aren’t really powerful. It’s the people we work for who are powerful. Oh sure, put me in an expensive suit, and I can enter an exclusive men’s club easier than can a woman or a black man. But it wouldn’t take the club long to know that I’m a BMCWM, and shun me. The truly powerful can smell their own. So, to many of you, BMCWM, while they may look like part of the power structure, only work for it. Nevertheless, you greet us with suspicion, which makes us stick together and hide defensively behind being boring.
Some BMCWM, on those rare occasions when they daydream, think we might want to rebel against being so boring. We wonder if we wouldn’t like some zeal in our lives, to discover a cause. The people in power worry a little about such dreams. They make sure we’re paid well, and they show interest in us to keep our allegiance, and to keep us boring. But you who have passion might win some of us over with respect and understanding. Remember, we weren’t necessarily born this way. So when you hear a group of us debating how to arrange our tools on a pegboard or how to select bond issues, be patient. Bite your tongue, look interested, and keep inviting us to dance. One day we might.
