Week Seven / Journal Eight

So how do your conflicts end?  What do you do that you think contributes to their ending?  What about in the world around you... what do you notice about how conflicts end?  

 I think, unfortunately, that the end of my conflicts has a lot to do with my deciding that I am willing/ready to give in. I don't know. I just seems to be in conflict a lot lately, and almost always the thing that sort of wraps it up and sees an end to it is when I admit or pretend that I'm wrong to let it go.


Which is frustrating, always to be the person who ends the conflict, but if it puts things back to normal/equilibrium, then I guess for me that usually outweighs the benefits I would get of knowing I didn't back down because I was in the right.


But I think that's kind of a pattern in real life, too--that a lot of conflicts don't end in a real, structural resolution so much as they end in a kind of petering out of things, where people decide that it's just not worth it any more and they officially or unofficially let it go, and the negative or unresolved emotions eventually get forgotten about or just become unimportant enough that people don't care any more.


Here are two examples of what I'm trying to articulate:


The other night, I got into a fight with a friend of a friend because she said something extremely unkind to Friend. I got on her case about it and was really nasty. Other continued to be unkind to Friend. Then Friend and Other worked the issue out, and Other asked for an apology from me, which I gave because I recognised that a) I had overreacted and b) it wasn't really my business. I was still upset about what Other had said, and I was really mad at myself for being such a jerk, but officially the conflict was over so nothing more was said. I'm still upset, but I imagine that over the next week or so I will gradually stop feeling so intensely about this and it will eventually fade.


On a less personal level, I'm thinking of the case of in Scottsboro where nine black kids (seriously kids--the two youngest were both thirteen) were accused of raping two white girls, which resulted in about twenty years of trial, pretty much destroyed the boys' lives, involved tons of expense in litigations, attracted worldwide attention, and then sort of just dropped out of the collective consciousness of the United States except for the people immediately involved. The conflict lost its scale and official status (eight of the young men were eventually judged not guilty and freed), but the long-reaching consequences continued to haunt the men and the conflict did not truly end until a number of years after, until the governer of Alabama finally issued a pardon to the last living man (whether that really truly ended things, even, is debateable).


And that really seems to be how conflicts end in real life, a lot of the time. There's an official end, where the people involved either give up or say things are resolved or whatever, but often it's a bit longer before there's a true emotional/consequential end.