Only you can prevent forest fires

A person who I know as both ref and skater, fairly new to both but who I have found to be consistently pleasant and receptive to feedback, recently made some assertions about the state of roller derby that have been described as uninformed, poorly argued, ill-conceived, and generally inappropriate.

This is unfortunate.

An observer who has earned, through years of hard work, the respect of many skaters and officials (including me) felt the situation was so egregiously bad that the original orator should be called out by name as an unredeemable douchebag.

This, too, is unfortunate, though I think it was handled with as much care and introspection as possible.

Reactions were varied. Most surprising to me were a couple of other people who seemed very eager to jump on the "this guy's a douchebag" bandwagon, even reading things into his statements that I don't see (more on this in a later post).

Ultimately, this bothered me more than the actual situation or the calling-out, but I think I did a poor job expressing that. Unredeemable douchebag is an extraordinary claim, and thus it requires extraordinary evidence before we should agree with it, even if we generally trust the source.

 

To be honest, I'm still digesting the situation. I cannot ignore the claim of douchebaggery, because it comes from a reliable source, but I also have a hard time accepting it when it's so counter to my own experience. I like to think that if I were one of the others, hearing things second-hand about someone I don't know, I'd still be as skeptical. It's hard to say.

In the meantime, it looks like a good time to remind folks about professionalism in officiating. If everyone had stuck to these simple tips, I wouldn't have felt compelled to stay up late rambling at you.

1. Don't be a douchebag.
2. Shut your pie hole.
3. Are you an obnoxious drunk? The afterparty isn't for you. Go home and hang out with a couple close friends (they can be skaters or officials or whatever) and drink there.
4. No, seriously, zip it.
5. Any official you don't know can be assumed to have earned your professional courtesy. Negative feedback is (usually) best done in private when everyone's sober, or at least attempted that way before going public. Drunkenness is no excuse for being a douchebag, of course, but we are always willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt, one time, that no one previously took the time to explain tips 1 through 4 above.
6. You are also entitled to professional courtesy, but only to the extent you give it to others.

7. ¡Silencio, por favor!
8. Have you ever noticed there are so many clever little aphorisms that cast a favorable light on keeping one's mouth closed and none that encourage talking? There's a reason for that.
9. That reason is "put a sock in it."
10. We are all in this together, to have fun advancing a sport that we enjoy. It's not perfect, and everybody knows that. We—all of us—are invited to make it better. Well-reasoned written arguments with concrete suggestions on how to improve things can be given serious consideration; drunken rants cannot.

One last note (which I hope is obvious): you are always invited to discuss things here, but if you know who I'm talking about (even/especially if it's you), or the substance of the rant, keep those data to yourself. That's not what this post is about. It doesn't matter what stupid thing was said to whom by whomever else, only that we should discourage our peers both from saying stupid things and from reacting stupidly when they're said anyway, and that we do so most effectively by examining ourselves and setting a good example.