IF YOU CARE, COMPLAIN
“I can help you,” I said to a friend recently. “I write a pretty good complaint letter.” I’ve written more than a few. I’m not a chronic complainer, but I believe in complaining — especially if your complaint serves the common good, if you’re in a place of enough privilege to know you probably won’t be harmed if you complain, if you’re informed enough to lodge a complaint that can’t be easily dismissed — marshalling relevant facts and deploying verbs no one can elide. If you’re in a position to do it, it might be your job to do it. Someone has to.
It’s a way of voting. Educated complaint keeps people accountable. It challenges evasive abstractions and generic excuses for incompetence, negligence, and professional abuses which, if they’re not challenged, become normalized.
Complaining is tricky, though. You run the risk of being “a complainer.” Especially if you’re a woman, your complaints are likely to be met with professional jargon or other forms of condescension (I don’t like the verb “mansplaining,” but it happens.) Especially when a woman ventures to complain about institutionalized offenses. Especially if those offenses have been successfully normalized. And complaining is hard to do if you’re someone who has internalized an ethic that valorizes “a cheerful, uncomplaining spirit” or stoical fortitude or “turning the other cheek” (a phrase, by the way, that comes from one of Jesus’ widely misread rabbinical teachings), you don’t complain for reasons of piety or self-respect.
A story I read recently by a physician whose purpose was to lodge a sharply detailed complaint about negligence and incompetence in a hospital where she was giving birth offered a fine example of informed complaint — as important in the ethics of clinical encounter as informed consent. But it also, if you read the footnote “about the author” becomes clear that there is a cost to complaining — sometimes an ongoing and very high cost. Ask any whistleblower.
Here’s another of Jesus’ teachings: “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” Being “wise as serpents” means knowing when to strike, where to expend your venom, what risks to take for the sake of protecting what needs protection. Sometimes our moments of striking out come quite naturally; our lives or those of people we love are at stake. Other times the decision requires a little more complicated discernment: Is this the time to speak up? What are the tradeoffs? Whom can I afford to piss off? Should I keep my powder dry? Start a petition instead? Or a class-action suit? Refer the matter to someone whose job it is to take it on?
Complaining on behalf of others, as in a class-action suit, raises its own ethical and social questions. As soon as you group people into a “class” — women who have just given birth, disabled adults, refugees — nuance begins to erode. It’s part of the cost. We can’t afford to forget Camus’ insistence that “Everyone is a special case.” Class action doesn’t substitute for attentiveness to, as physicians put it, each “presenting complaint.”
This story (which I encourage you to read — see the link below) about one woman’s traumatic experience in a hospital where care was, to put it gently, poorly coordinated, matters in ways no policy statement could make clear. Reading her story I care about her, and about her baby. I’m outraged at what seems to be callous disregard of her comfort, dismissal of her fears, disingenuousness.
One story invites others. Institutional policies change slowly, but stories build pressure. Good complaints are stories. Hearing each other’s stories is necessary to keep us engaged, honest, compassionate, and sufficiently outraged to act on each other’s behalf.
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Story mentioned above: Tricia Pil, “Babel: The Voices of a Medical Trauma,” https://pulsevoices.org/index.php/pulse-stories/142-babel-the-voices-of-a-medical-trauma