LeliaThomas.Com

A Complaint About Not Complaining

During my random browsing of the web, I came across this church’s efforts to break the habit of complaining. On the surface, this looks great, but let me take a moment to complain about this to persuade you to think otherwise.

Complaint is a natural part of speech, and it is important. Granted, unless one uses logic to decide what is worthy of true complaint, one can become a chronic complainer, in which case the world hates you, so you have a right to complain more. Yet I would argue there are not too many people like that in the world. There are, rather, many types of legitimate complaints, such as the following:

• Sarcastic complaints.
• Complaints against a truly wrong norm or establishment.
• Complaints against abuse.
• Complaints against a general wrongdoing.

There are others, I’m sure, but those were the ones that came to my mind first. Those are legitimate forms of complaint, which is a legitimate part of speech. It is a form of disagreement and dissent (and sometimes humor), just as much as it is a means of depressing a situation.

The irony of this is that a church is suggesting people should stop complaining. I can only think of a few other establishments that complain more, and those establishments are religious or political in nature as well. Who but a church complains more about the awful state of the world, about the ever declining morals of today’s youth, about lack of funds, about the loss of good men and obedient–I mean–good women?

Not sweating the small stuff, as they say, is good for all of us and should be practiced, but to encourage people to completely stop complaint is to essentially encourage the lopping off someone’s ability to disagree.

Not to say, of course, that churches in the past have not encouraged such a thing.

Comments ordered from oldest to newest.

shelly

The church I attend recently did something similar…only they used rubber bands (red ones to boot); and, if you caught yourself being critical of something, or complaining about something, you had to snap your wrist with it. I refused to participate for similar reasons to what you cite, not to mention, IMO, snapping your wrist with a rubber band could be tantamount to self-abuse.

Lelia

Snapping a rubber band on one’s wrist is a method I’ve heard of some psychologists using to help ween cutters off of cutting. Seems a bit extreme for things like complaint and criticism, doesn’t it?

I will always be bothered by organizations that wish to quiet dissent or, more as in your case, want to question or end critical thinking. There’s nothing wrong with critical thinking, particularly about important matters.