Cinco de Mayo

I'm not feeling very celebratory this morning, even though things ought to be better now.
It occurs to me that my "passive-aggresive hospitality" was never really directed at the customers: even when one fellow who came down and chewed me out for about ten minutes straight for all the problems everyone else had caused him (this was one of the time Mai didn't schedule me to work both the evening and the following morning shifts, so I knew exactly who had caused all the problems), I stood there and took it, just like a good desk clerk should. The bell-captain came up to me afterwards and told me that he--Dan, a really nice guy--would have punched the fellow. I could take the flak from the customers, but that was very draining for me.
Mai, on the other hand, wanted everything to go exactly by the book, regardless of the lived reality of the situation. That drove me nuts: you can either complain that things aren't the way they're supposed to be, or you can deal with the situation as it is. I see that as one primary difference between conservatives and liberals: the conservatives tend to want people to abide by rules and punish them if they don't, whereas the liberals tend to try to deal with the situation as they see it, and make things better. People are using needle drugs: throw them all in jail, or start a needle-exchange program? Gay men (and of course, many, many others) are having unprotected sex, contracting and spreading AIDS: call it God's punishment and counsel abstinence, or distribute condoms and educate people (which might help reduce promiscuity)? There are of course a lot if issues, but this is the basic pattern I see. And when I see it elsewhere--people trying to enforce an idealized version of reality, what Rush calls "The Way Things Ought to Be," and complaining or punishing, rather than adapting and trying to help a situation--I get frustrated.
Of course, I did antagonize Mai a bit. If I knew where she was today, I'd ask for her forgiveness: in my reactivity, I became part of the problem.