Dispatches from the Ivory Trailer: Imagine the possibility of a complaint-free world? No thanks
Matt Zuefle
May 8, 2008
Have you heard about the Complaint Free World movement? It apparently started in a Unity church in Missouri a little over a year ago when the pastor challenged the congregation to quit their belly-achin’ for a while. The nature of the challenge? To go 21 days without griping, moaning, complaining, or generally being grumpy.
Key to the idea was a little rubber wrist bracelet of the kind popular with many causes in recent years. If the parishioners caught themselves complaining, they were supposed to take the bracelet off, put it on the other wrist, and start all over again. By March of 2007, the idea had made it to MSNBC and other media venues and had attracted over 100,000 non-complainers. Now the movement has an organization behind it and claims that over 5.3 million folks worldwide have taken up the challenge.
If you want to order the purple bracelets and give it a whirl, you can do so by checking out the Web site: www.acomplaintfreeworld.org. It turns out you can have two bracelets for free, but you can make only one order of two per family (a 75 cent shipping and handling charge applies). Along with purple bracelets you can also order books, CDs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, teaching supplies, and more goodies online.
But what if you have a large family, or wish to give them out as gifts to others? Even though, according to the Web site, they would like to give them all away for free, you can also buy them in packs of five if your need is greater. One pack of five costs $5, and with increasing order sizes, a progressive price break becomes available until you can buy over 10,000 bracelets for only $1 per five-pack. (Orders ship in four to six weeks.)
Hmmm…that makes an order of five bracelets cost a buck apiece, but in the giant-sized order they are only 20 cents each. I wonder what the unit cost is…
If the small order is sold at close to their actual cost, that means they’re losing $8,000 on the big order. On the other hand (or wrist, as it were), if the unit price is better reflected in the jumbo order, then they’re making a 400 percent profit on every $5 sale to the average family. I don’t mean to complain, and I understand that all proceeds go to furthering this charitable cause, but this does seem like an interesting set of questions.
The pastor who came up with the idea for the movement and its wristbands is named Will Bowen, and if you act fast, you can even sign up for advanced booking on a Complaint Free Caribbean Cruise with him and other “positive people from around the world” scheduled for next spring. Let’s hope the boat doesn’t get lost or that all of the passengers get one of those infamous gastrointestinal ailments that plague cruise ships nowadays — that might stretch the no-complaining theme to limits never anticipated.
I do think the “no complaints” idea has a certain simplistic charm to it. Indeed, we’ve all heard our share of complaints and probably made more than a few, too. And after a while, too much complaining can become mighty grating. But the idea of a “no complaints policy” is clearly one that would be most popular with two main groups of people: 1) folks who don’t have too many serious complaints to make at present, and 2) people who are in the habit of doing things that probably should be complained about.
I, for one, don’t want to live in a complaint-free world. While I’ll readily agree with the “no-complainers” that we ought to be thankful for all of the good things in our lives, moderate our expectations, work to make change in ourselves, and be more tolerant — I surely don’t think these worthwhile goals equal “not complaining” or anything like it. One thing that the complaint-free group is in danger of ignoring with some of the pithy quotes it embraces is that complaining is in fact doing something, and that it is a way of affecting change — sometimes the only means available to the weak, poor, disenfranchised and exploited.
Complaining is natural human behavior, and no matter how annoying it can be at times, it’s probably very necessary. Without it, there would be untold perpetuations of abuses and injustice. Without it, there would be no whistleblowers speaking up in the public interest, nor complainants who make real allegations against wrongdoers in court. Without it, babies couldn’t let us know when it’s time to change their diapers. What we ought to strive for is not a complaint-free world, but a world where complaints are raised only when truly justified, and offered along with honesty, kindness, humility, and maybe even when possible, a little humor.
And by the way, if you don’t agree with me and think that this column is disappointingly cynical compared to some of my past ones, then please make sure you take the time to switch your sort-of-free purple bracelet to the other wrist before you decide to write a letter complaining about it.
Editor’s note: Originally published in Matt’s weekly column “Dispatches from the Ivory Trailer” in Oxford Town (Oxford, Mississippi). Matt Zuefle, who formerly taught at Ohio University and wrote columns for The Athens NEWS, can be contacted at crotaxa@hotmail.com.
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