MONKEYS ON A CHAIR.
Hear me out on this one. It's about the toxicity that's been going around in the JD community. I've seen people having some very intense interactions with each other, and I want to tell you all a story about monkeys on a chair, and how we're quite like them.

You take four monkeys and you put them all into a room together. I picture this room as pristine, white-tiled, and clinical, with one-way glass and doctors in lab coats on the other side, but feel free to put your own spin on it. In the middle of the room, there's a chair.

Above the chair, hanging from the ceiling, there's a banana. Of course, the monkeys try climbing onto the chair to grab the banana. As soon as they do, the assholes in lab coats on the other side of the glass hose the monkeys down with a forceful beam of water.

That's brutal. The monkeys don't try climbing the chair anymore.

Then they go, okay, Fred, you've been through enough. Jeannie, Lloyd, Francine, screw you, you're staying. Here's a new friend. Call him Paul. Play nice.

But then Paul of course sees the banana and immediately tries to climb the chair. The rest of the monkeys don't want to be hosed down, so they pull him off and beat him up a little for good measure. Paul needs to know he can't be climbing on that damn chair.

One by one, you can replace all the monkeys, until none of them have ever been hosed down, until none of them have been beaten up by a monkey that was itself hosed down. They don't know why they can't be climbing on that chair, but they sure will beat up the next one who tries.

This community has been around for four years, and it's gotten its share of hosings-down in the past and present. From what I've heard, four years ago, defending JD would mean you'd get death threats and other vile abuse. There have been stalking 'journalists'. And Natalia.

So of course people have their guard up. There's some seriously heavy topics that are discussed around here, and many of us have some serious baggage related to those topics, too. We want to do right by each other, and by JD. We want to help. But so do those monkeys.

They want to help keep themselves and each other safe, and as a result, they end up lashing out at each other.

Now, we've got one big advantage on those chair-climbing monkeys. A well-developed sense of self-awareness.

We can be aware of our impulse to lash out at the monkey climbing on the chair and think about the reason we want to beat them up. We can ask ourselves whether we know and understand the reason, whether it holds up. Maybe the situation has changed and you won't get hosed now.

The tricky thing here is, maybe it hasn't changed. There's still a definite value in your own safety mechanisms. They're trying to keep you safe, after all.

But then there's all these new monkeys climbing on chairs as if it's nothing, and all your hairs stand on end.

Okay I lied, there's another advantage we have on the monkeys. A well-developed set of communication skills.

Those new monkeys don't understand why you're beating them up. Maybe even you barely do. Perhaps a simple explanation would to the trick.

Show them why you have the reaction you do. Help them see your perspective. Don't just lash out in anger, but try to build understanding. If they're not receptive to a genuine effort of that, fuck, at least you tried, you know?

There's also been lots of games of telephone going on on here, where some people seem to have seen that there was something going on, but didn't see what, and thought the 'drama' was about things that it wasn't about. Then some reactions quickly seem overblown.

In the end, we're all a bunch of monkeys on a chair. Or leering at the chair from a safe corner, maybe. But we're also capable of a perspective-taking no monkey has achieved before, and that can be our strength if we let it.

That means treating people charitably until they've shown they will abuse that charity. It means assuming the person you're dealing with is reasonable and the reason you don't get what they're on about is that you're missing crucial information.

So if you made jokes that people are mad at, try figuring out why people are mad about them.
If you're mad at jokes people made, try to help them understand why.
If you think people are overreacting, try to figure out what meaning this has to them that you don't see.

If it's hard to do that in the moment, take time to think about it, or reevaluate a decision later. Sometimes you pull weird shit and you gotta apologize.

These are the things that set us apart from being a bunch of monkeys on a chair hurling rage at each other.

And look, you have no reason to listen to me, I have no authority to tell you what to do. I'm just saying I've seen a lot of talk about toxicity, and this is how you actually draw that out. That's an investment of time and energy not everyone has available.

All I can hope to offer is some insight and tools that could help. I hate to see the arguing and I especially hate the feeling that wires are getting crossed and that that's fueling the conflict. I also know I'm calling y'all monkeys and I just want to say that's out of love.

Because if we have to argue and bicker, can we at least laugh at ourselves for being the dumb monkeys that we are?

#MonkeysOnAChair