It ruins countless reputations and may even help put innocent people in jail or prison. It ends even the closest friendships and marriages. It erodes much trust between spouses and between the dearest of friends. It causes untold personal misery and heartbreak, due to losing dear friends and beloved mates. It is a trap and deceptively fun to engage in, but it is no fun to be the object of it. It is called gossip, and on the surface it seems like no big deal when you think of serious societal ills, like crime, hunger, war and world poverty. But as it is behind so much pain and grief, it really is a trap and a big deal. If we value our marriages and our friendships, especially our closet friendships, we ought to be on our guard to end any role we may have in the gossip mill, and keep this deceptive evil from our relationships.
So what is this deceptive social evil that ruins so many relationships and reputations? Gossip is not just maliciously telling lies about another person. It isn't simply betraying confidences shared with us. It's easy to define it as just those things, and if it were just that, many of us would be innocent of this social evil. Ah, gossip is much broader than this, as so many other forms of it have the same potential to ruin reputations or relationships even with the absence of any intent. First, there is the old practice that so many of us have, of spreading rumors about other persons, even when these rumors are unconfirmed and we can't or won't go the person involved and verify the accuracy of what we heard. This is so easy to do, that if we are not on our guard against this, we will spread rumors without thinking about it. It may give us a false and sick feeling of importance if we can "build ourselves up" by tearing others down. Examples are: "Oh boy, I heard that her teenage daughter may be pregnant. How awful!" If you are a person of faith, you may even repeat this rumor in the form of a prayer request to your group of Christian friends, but without the person's permission. You may hear about a friend's pending divorce, and put the word out: "Say, did you hear? So-and-so is getting a divorce!" If you are a person of faith, you may get that word out in the form of a prayer request, telling your group of Christian friends: "We have to pray about this!" All without the person's permission! Oh, gossip is so deceptive!
A subtle for of gossip is called "triangulation" and is often engaged in as a way to deal with being hurt or upset by others. Here is how this works: Someone hurts or upsets us; we feel unable or unwilling to deal with the person (s) involved, and so we gripe or talk to third parties with no intention to solve anything. Since getting hurt is so much a part of life, this is probably, after spreading rumors, the most common form of gossip there is. We participate in this form of gossip in weakness and often out of fear. This is the form of gossip that I have engaged in all my life more than any other, and still do. Let's face it; it's far easier to gripe or talk with third parties than it is to bravely go directly to the offending person (s) and lovingly talk to them about what upsets us. We may mess up or the person may not even listen to us. But "resolving conflicts" by walking out and talking about the offending person instead of to them, means that the marriage or friendship is in trouble. As long as we attempt to talk to each other in love, there is still a chance. Once we stop that, the relationship may be dead. The exception to going behind a person's back is when we know a person is suicidal or homicidal. In that case, safety is more important than privacy. But this is rare.
The subtlest form of gossip is passive, and we can term it listening to gossip, or being a party to it. It looks like this: We may read and even purchase, celebrity or political magazines that are created mainly to gossip about these politicians or celebrities. We listen to gossip when we tune in, just for entertainment, to talk shows that are set up to gossip about celebrities, criminals, or politicians. Yes, those in the public eye are accountable to us and we have the right to know about them, but only to the a point. We listen to gossip when family or friends rant on about others to us, and we allow their rants to go unchallenged. It is hard to stem the tide, and tell the loved one or friend, "This is really none of my business. Have you tried going to that person?" Yet, as the saying goes, "If a person gossips TO you, that person is gossiping ABOUT you or will gossip ABOUT you." It's so easy to listen to gossip because it is fun to hear about how bad or bad off others are, as compared to us. We let family and friends gossip to us because we may feel included in on secrets or may just don't want to offend them by challenging them. Yet much gossip would stop if we would quit enabling it.
This social evil has gone high-tech, and is behind much cyber-bullying. What does gossip look like online? It comes in the form of lies or rumors spread online, whether through texts, emails, blogs, or social networking status updates. Gossip happens when, instead of dealing with an online contact directly, through private messaging, we post about them in public forums, as on blogs, or via posts or comments. Yes, I know that many users ignore their inbox messages, and many people don't hear us out. But if we value our relationships, we owe it to the other person and to ourselves to at least try. So many users of social networks unfriend or block other users because of they listen to gossip rather than go to the person directly. As an admittedly heavy Facebook user, I know that I have lost many Facebook friendships for that reason. I would have occasional fallings-out with certain users, and they would rant about me to our mutual online friends. Those friends would listen to the gossip rather than confront me and ask me what the problem is. I know this to be so because of the timing of so many lost Facebook friendships and reasons given as to why I "had" to be deleted. We listen to online gossip when we visit sites, blogs, or "like" pages set up mainly to gossip about criminal, politicians, or celebrities. The Internet has power to be used to serve God and people, but when we use it for gossip, we are using it for bad.
These are the holidays, and if we don't have much money, we can still give people the gift of being able to trust us. We can help them uphold their reputations. We can fight for our marriages and friendships. We can stop wasting our time in watching and listening to trash that does nothing to build anyone up. We can build others up instead of tear them down. We can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
The above photo is courtesy of MorgueFile.com, is by earl53, and can be found here.
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