you cant expect people to be the bigger person!

so as misleading as the title sounds, i want to make it clear that i'm not trying to say that people who take action against those who wrong them or others are 100% justified in doing so. what i'm saying is that what a lot of people mean when they say "you really need to be the bigger person about this" is "this person can act the way they do and i won't care, but if you try to treat them the same, then you're in the wrong!!" they don't really care about you being the bigger person, they care about using your reaction to make the perpetrator look like the victim.

there's a lot of good examples of this- for one, whenever any marginalized group makes jokes about "what if the situation was the other way around," suddenly they're just as bad as their oppressors. i've noticed this happens a lot for the queer community: we'll make jokes talking about cishet people the same way homophobes tend to talk about or to us, and all of a sudden we're being "straightphobic" towards them. i mean, i could literally lose access to medical healthcare and i'm not allowed to exist in numerous countries, but sure, you can relate because i said "it's fine if you're straight, just keep it away from the kids :)" 

another form of this comes as something i touched on in a blog post on my main last night: bullies who can't stand on their actions. it baffles me that there's some people out there that think they can treat other people poorly without any problems, but as soon as they get that energy sent back to them, they were "just joking" or "they didn't mean it like that." yes you did!! if you don't know the person you're saying those things to, then you don't know that person well enough for it to be a joke, you just noticed some unflattering detail about them and decided to ridicule them for it, and since you didn't the response you were after you're trying to backtrack. i think that petty mean behavior is bad regardless of who's doing it, but i also believe that if you hit first, then you should expect to get hit back. your actions have consequences, and you shouldn't go dishing out behavior you clearly can't take, because if you knew it's wrong then you knew it was wrong when you did it, too.

all in all, it's important to make sure people take responsibility for their actions instead of deflecting blame onto the victims of them. change doesn't start with telling someone not to react to a problem- it starts with addressing and fixing the problem they're reacting to.

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