{"id":1121,"date":"2019-10-24T20:49:54","date_gmt":"2019-10-25T03:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/?p=1121"},"modified":"2019-10-24T20:49:54","modified_gmt":"2019-10-25T03:49:54","slug":"dont-take-offense-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/?p=1121","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Take Offense; Remember"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the middle of my career I was given a gift. The nurse I\nhad worked with for a long time told me she would need to be leaving the office\nat 4PM each day to deal with family issues. She said she could arrange for\nsomeone to cover for the last couple hours of the day. I thought about it long\nand hard and said, OK, I will see my last patient at 4, then with finishing\ndictation, paperwork and hospital rounds I could be home by 5-530. Prior to\nthis I\u2019d get home by 630-7 on days I wasn\u2019t on call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with this new schedule I was able to get home and have\ndinner with my wife and four daughters most nights. It was a generous gift. It\ncost me money, but I gained in memories and time with my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My oldest daughter was by then in Junior Hi School, the\nyoungest in grade school. It was expected that we all sit around the table,\npass the food and have conversation. One prolonged conversation I remember had\nto do with one daughter reacting to another with the loud declaration, \u201cI am\noffended that you would say that!\u201d The conversation usually stopped for a while\nafter such a declaration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the pattern kept being repeated I intervened. \u201cTaking\noffense is something you have control over. You are not in control over what\ncomes out of your sister\u2019s mouth. If you want to have a conversation, it\u2019s fine\nto feel offended, but you cannot expect the person you are conversing with to\nguess or know what might offend you. Take control of your own offense. Share\nyour feelings if you chose, but when you take offense and react with anger, the\nconversation is probably over. We can do better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can imagine with school-age daughters this took some\npractice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This last week we had our President\u2019s Chief of Staff tell us\nall to \u201cGet over it!\u201d when reporters questioned him on our president seeking\naid from a foreign leader for his own political benefit. In fact, he\nacknowledged that the president withheld appropriated military aid to\nincentivize cooperation, though President Trump has declared, \u201cNo quid pro quo!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Chief of Staff\u2019s \u201cGet over it!\u201d declaration sounded like\nwe, or the reporter might have taken offense at a politically incorrect\nutterance. Indeed, the Trump for President campaign now has embraced the slogan\n\u201cGet Over It\u201d with a fund-raising t-shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a conversation is the goal, it is important to \u201cget\nover\u201d one\u2019s strong feelings to further understanding. But when one needs to be\nmaking judgements about another person\u2019s character or indeed actions, I think\nof another phrase I ran across in medical residency training. Residents are new\nmedical school graduates. We had four years of medical school and limited\npatient care and management but now we staffed hospital wards, emergency rooms\nand clinics under the supervision of teaching attending physicians. The phrase\nI heard that stuck with me was from good teachers who ultimately would decide\nwhether we residents would graduate to the position of practicing physicians.\nIt was: \u201cForgive and Remember\u201d. Mistakes occur, some can be severe; forgive\nthose mistakes, but remember them and look for patterns, because some patterns\ncan prove to be fatal for patients when a physician is independently\npracticing. If these patterns cannot be corrected, the resident should not be\ngraduated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My interpretation of \u201cGet over it!\u201d was our President\u2019s\nchief of staff calling for us to either dismiss shaking down a foreign leader\nas unimportant, or just forget that it might be an illegal bribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand that many are offended by our President\u2019s\ndemeanor, his tweets, his untruths, his policy decisions and actions. We should\n\u201cGet Over\u201d our feelings of offense. But we should remember his actions, his\ncumulative behavior, his abuse of power and then make some judgement about his\nfitness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the middle of my career I was given a gift. The nurse I had worked with for a long time told me she would need to be leaving the office at 4PM each day to deal with family issues. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1123,"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121\/revisions\/1123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danschmidtforsenate.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}