“I’m judging you all. Harshly.”

I posted that on my Facebook the other day. This was after just about everyone had to run  their mouths about the sad events in Libya. And it was true. I was judging everyone harshly. And I posted it because it was just easier to get right to the point rather than try to construct a witty few sentences that inoffensively said the same thing. I didn’t want that point to be missed.

I am judging you all harshly. I do it every day. I judge your decisions. I judge your morals. I judge your actions. I judge your words. I judge your clothing choices. I judge everything about you. Harshly.

Now, here’s the twist.

When most people think about judging other people or other people judging them, they tend to think about it terms of good and bad. People are judging you to be good or bad. You’re a good person or a bad person. You’re a success or a failure. You’re right or wrong.

When most people think about judging other people or other people judging them, they also tend to judge in relation to themselves. Is this person better or worse than me?

When I judge people…I just judge people.

I don’t think much in terms of good or bad. Are you someone I want to know or not? That’s basically what it boils down to. I’ve known some totally worthless people in my time. Drunk. Never had a pot to piss in. Constantly fucking up in life. But I liked them. They were funny, caring, interesting people. I wouldn’t ask them to do anything for me, wouldn’t trust them to take a dollar and not spend it on booze, but they were all right.

And then there are those with the spit and polished life of perfection that have the successful career and the college education and the spouse and the children and the church commitments and the everything and I wouldn’t want to spend one minute with them.

No one is exempt from this. I judge EVERYONE. Constantly. Harshly. Family, friends, former classmates, Twitter followers, strangers, whatever. Everybody gets run through the judgmental filter in my brain. Repeatedly.

For me, this constant judgement keeps me conscious of who people are. It’s more of an objective thing in the sense that my opinion of a person only changes in the sense of “do I want to be around this person” rather than “this is a good/bad person”. I can’t judge that. I’m a horrible person when you boil it all down. Far be it from me to make that call.

But I can make the call on how much you get on my nerves. How pleasant do I find you right now? What are you saying? What are you doing? How are you affecting me whether you know it or not?

That’s really why I’m so judgmental. I’m selfish. We’ve already established that in previous blog posts. It’s all about me. How are you affecting me? How is your behavior and your words affecting me? I don’t care what anyone else thinks of you. It’s all about me.

There was a guy I went to school with that everyone liked. He was funny, a good Christian, nice guy, all around good person. Except he didn’t like cats. He didn’t just not like cats. He HATED cats. He once wished that a cat would get killed on the freeway.

He recently passed away very unexpectedly. Many people were eulogizing him on Facebook, talking about what a great guy he was and while I paid my respects as is proper, I don’t think he was that great of a guy. He wished death on an animal because he didn’t like it. That speaks so loudly to me it practically screams. I can’t think of someone as a “good person” when they do stuff like that.

I judged him harshly. I’m still judging him harshly and he’s dead. Anytime someone brings him up all I can think is, “but he once wished death on a cat”.

I’m sure there are going to be a few of my classmates that read this post and take exception to this and no doubt want to tell me that I’m a horrible person. And that’s fine. That’s been established. But, I would like to point out that at no point did I say that I’m happy he’s dead. I’m not. I reserve that sort of thing for a very select group of people and he was most definitely not in that group. What I am saying is that one comment from him, whether he meant it or not (and if he didn’t mean it that doesn’t make him look any better in my eyes),  influenced how I judged him from that point on.

That’s just one example. This has happened dozens of times with dozens of people. I judge you on your past and your present. I judge and I judge and I judge.

In fact, I’m judging you right now.

Harshly.