Conflict Resolution

There's something to be said for a good fistfight. Really. Not a drunken fistfight outside a pub over some slutty girl, but when two men have a problem over something, it's not always a bad thing. They throw a few haymakers, someone gets a bloody nose, and then they hug and everything is back to normal. Conflict: Resoluted.

But in today's society, this is no longer an option. Grown men aren't allowed to fight one another. So this aggression manifests itself in different ways.

On Thursday night, I skipped basketball and went to the Annual General Members meeting of my local expat group. I attended because I am interested in taking over their newsletter production - I think it would be a good way to meet some professional contacts.

(Side note: El Duque throwing up 53-mph curves? Ooh, it makes me shudder just thinking about it. What a throwback. Love that guy.)

Anyhoo, the meeting is going along fine until it comes time to elect a new chairperson for the coming year. There is only one nomination, for a guy we will call Beantown. (The man who is serving as the acting chair, "Niko", does not want to be chair as he does not have the time.)

Now Beantown is dressed in a suit and from his complexion, it looks like his shirt and tie are cutting off circulation to his head. He accepts the nomination.

Beantown, who may have lost a few marbles during his army days, fields a question from a member of the audience. She says: "you were the chair last year and you resigned after only a few months. What assurances can you give us that this won't happen again?"

A fair question. Beantown asks Niko for the floor. Niko, who as acting chair is running the meeting, obliges.

Beantown takes this as a cue to start a random, rambling diatribe with little or no coherence. Niko tries to cut him off, but Beantown cites some strange point of Parliamentary procedure and continues to filibuster, all the while getting visibly upset. His little head, which resembles a (use your imagination), starts throbbing and turning deeper shades of red and purple.

Then he comes to it. He resigned because another member of the board made anti-American comments during a board meeting. When the comments were not apologized for or rescinded, he resigned. (He is reading this from a prepared speech - my account is pretty much verbatim.)

Anticipating a fairly boring, 45-minute meeting, I am now starting to get entertained.

The audience is getting the feeling that he is trying to hijack the club. A hostile takeover of a non-profit, international organization whose main goal is to set up freaking language groups and museum tours. Yep. That sounds about right.

(side note: only undefeated team in baseball? You guessed it - your Milwaukee Brewers!)

Well, he finally finishes up and another lady in the audience makes the comment - "do you really think your attitude is fitting of a leader?" Again, completely fair comment.

At this stage, some freakishly tall British guy (Fish & Chips) on the board stands up and says, "blah blah blah, the person who made these comments is ME! I don't know what I said...yadda yadda, no one has told me what I did wrong...I'm the victim..."

You get the point.

(Turns out, Fish & Chips is a lying sack of shit. He told me after the meeting exactly what he said that pissed off Beantown. They got into an argument over how to do something and it basically went like this:

Beantown: I'm the chair, we are going to do it my way.

Fish & Chips: No. We are in Switzerland now, we will do it the Swiss way. You Americans are all the same.

Beantown: excuse me?

Fish & Chips: Yeah, you march all over the world, trying to impose your culture on everyone and everything...

Beantown: Yeah, well we bailed you TEA-SIPPERS out of WWII!

Fish & Chips: Name one war you dickfaces won without help!!!

That's the abbreviated version. And Fish & Chips has the audacity to get up in front of the entire group and pretend he doesn't know what the big deal is. Sure, dude. Whatever...)

Long story short - obviously no one wanted Beantown to be the chair so Niko, who incidentally is a hell of a guy, saw that he had to step in and be the chair.

My point? (Yes, there is one.) These guys should have just dropped the gloves and had it out after the board meeting. Would have solved a lot of problems. I mean, we are talking about an incident that happened the better part of a year ago, and yet they choose this forum to continue the disagreement.

Humans have natural urges, just like anyone else. Fighting is one of these urges. (An example of another urge is doing it.) People get into trouble when these urges aren't addressed. When they aren't, we get two grown men acting like four year olds in front of an audience of 50 people. (Embarrassing for them, but entertaining for me.)

(Oh, I suppose they could have talked it out over a beer or something, but what's the fun in that?)

Unfortunately, the Swiss people don't share my views on this particular subject. Case in point, my big fat RED CARD last night.

(OK, those of you that know me know it's not such a shock that I get red-carded. But in a freaking company soccer game?)

So here's the sitch: I take a ball and am driving into the penalty area and a dude takes out my feet. It is right on the edge of the box (I mean right on - I had chalk on my hands and jersey). So I look to see if the ref is going to give a penalty. The guy who fouled me starts getting up in my grill as I am picking myself up off the ground. He starts talking some shit in German (well at least I think it was smack, he could have been talking about the weather for all I know.)

But the fact remains that this guy is frontin', so I get up in is face and push him (in his flabby man-tits). Predictably, he flops like a little bitch. This amuses me. I proceed to stand over him and inquire if he has a problem. He continues to flop like a little bitch. In fact, I think I am going to call him Little Bitch from now on.

(By the way, this was hilarious. Only on a soccer field will you see grown men do this. Can you imagine if this happened at work or at a coffee shop?

"Here's your latte, sir."

(thrashing around) "Aaaaaghgh!")

Now as Little Bitch is lying on his back below me, I see the fear in his eyes. I mean, in Switzerland, it is considered to flop around on the turf like a little bitch. It is not normal to have the opponent call you on your bullshit. So I see, just for a second, the "is this guy really crazy? Is he going to Artest me?" flash across his face. But then once his teammates make a sufficient distance between the two of us, he makes a "hold me back, guys" run at me, followed by a heavily-accented "Fuck off!"

Of course, I got sent off (shocked, I thought it would be yellow) and we end up losing the game, so I feel bad about that. It should be mentioned that I never lost my cool during this "incident," it was more amusing than anything else. Of course my teammates didn't think so... I will have plenty of time to think about it on the bench for the rest of the season - now that they think I am "geisteskrank."

So yeah, maybe I am full of shit about conflict resolution. In fact, I think it's a pretty good bet. You wanna fight about it?