What Are The Six Most Dangerous Words?

While working on an important publication for a New England boarding school, the six most dangerous words came spilling out of my mouth and then in what seemed like a torrent of incidents, started biting me in the ass, making me wish I had never uttered them in the first place. What were those words? “All you have to do is . . .”

I was in a meeting where, along with my esteemed colleagues, we were making the final decision about photos just prior to the piece going to the printer. There was an extraordinary debate going on about whether to use a particular photo or not. The student in the photo was the son of one of our biggest donors—a trustee of the iconic class—but the boy had recently gotten into some trouble, so the development office was in a quandary about whether that photo should be used or not. Finally, in order to wrap up the meeting, I said, “Let’s just run with this photo for now. If the kid gets into more hot water before the piece is actually on the press, all we have to do is drop in a new photo.”

Happily, everyone agreed to this interim solution. In the end we never had to make a photo substitution but my cavalier and dismissive “all we have to do is” solution came back to bite me, and bite me, and bite me until I felt like I’d explode by ordering one of my colleagues to, “Bite me!” It was several months later when at the critical point in production of another piece was at hand, the director turned to me looking for approval when he confidently said, “Well, we don’t have to decide now, all we have to do is drop the correction in before it goes on press.” What had I done? Pretty soon and even years later, every point of decision seemed to be inescapably avoided by waving the magic wand of indecisiveness and declaring with those now irritating words, “All you have to do is . . . fill in the blank.”

With each use of the phrase I began to realize that I hadn’t started this phenomenal dilution of complicated problems. That, in fact, the phrase had been used for decades, maybe centuries in an attempt to diminish and dismiss complex problems. In some cases, the phrase was used to discredit the people who were seemingly dragging their feet in solving a problem with multiple components. When a colleague of mine was particularly frustrated with the headmaster’s assistant, she said with as much contempt as she could muster, “What’s taking her so long on this project? All she has to do is answer the phone over there.” With the efficiency of white out, my colleague completely dismissed the fact that the headmaster’s assistant did much more than answer the phone. After all, the very reason for the complaint was because she was running late on a very complicated project for us.

Illustrative of my point, my husband and I were visiting my very Republican parents in Florida several years ago. My pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mother was watching Rush Limbaugh on television. At the time, my husband and I had no notion of who he was and so as he spoke, we both started to smirk and even giggle. My mother kept shooting us “behave yourselves” looks but we just got more tickled than ever. “All you have to do is have these welfare mothers get jobs and get working!” he railed. “All you have to do is increase oil production in Alaska and become an independent oil-producing nation!” “All you have to do is arrest all the drug lords to have a drug-free America!” It was too much. Who was this fantastic stand-up comedian? And why was my mother watching him but not laughing?

Mom was pretty furious with us for thinking her favorite political pundit was a stand-up comedian but it was then that I realized that any sentence that began, “All you have to do is . . .” was sure to be referring to very complex and, in some cases, unsolvable issues. Therefore, they forever more became what I refer to as “the six most dangerous words.”

As I continued to contemplate how often I heard “All you have to do is . . .” I began to think about the stories of my life and the stories of people whose lives have somehow been woven into the fabric of mine. How often have the complexities of a human life been distilled into a simple catch phrase in order to explain it all? “Well, her father was a terrible drunk, you know,” to explain why a daughter never could hold a job. “Oh didn’t you know? His parents divorced when he was eight years old,” to explain why a young man was not interested in women.

My goal, in writing, is to juxtapose the absurdity of trying to dilute each story into a “category,” to the web of intricate emotional decisions that actually lead to the outcome. Some of my stories are non-fiction, character studies of real people, using their real names . . . in many ways, these are tributes. Some of my stories are thinly disguised as fiction. To those who know me best, it won't be hard to make the connections back to the non-fictionalized circumstances that gave rise to these accounts. The reason I have fictionalized them are numerous, but the top two are to  preserve the anonymity of the characters among those who really have no idea where I got the story in the first place, and to protect myself. One of the things I've learned about writing non-fiction from my memory is that my memory is sometimes not very reliable, and I don't want to be held accountable for details that I've filled in for the sake of the storytelling. As a colleague's father used to say, “Don't let facts interfere with the telling of a good story.” Finally, some of my stories are a complete fabrication coming entirely from my imagination. Regarding the second two types of stories, I will not identify for my audience which is which. In the case of non-fiction character studies, I will definitely identify those as such. I might throw in a poem here and there as I have written a few I'm particularly happy with.

I hope you'll enjoy “The Six Most Dangerous Words” and will come back to visit often.

copyright © 2010 DJ Anderson