"Don't Judge Me!"

The drill sergeant is judging the soldier in front of him.

"Don't Judge Me!" was a phrase I heard more and more often in the last years I served in the Army National Guard.  It was often a surly young soldier telling her superior she was having a bad day and that's why her uniform, weapon, vehicle or work area looks bad.

Telling a sergeant or an officer not to judge you is like telling a wolf to be a vegan.

Not vegan......

When Jesus said, "Judge not....."it was both a warning and guide to the direction of a truly spiritual life, in the sense that it is a life emptied of concern for this world.

Anyone with expertise in this world judges others.

The essence of the warrant officer rank in the Army is someone who has considerable expertise in aircraft or trucks or weapons or administration.  That warrant officer judges everybody within the world of his shop, her hangar, his range, her office.

I have walked into a maintenance building and had a warrant officer gesture toward a mechanic who was trying to replace a turbocharger on a the V-12 diesel engine that powers Patton tanks. Along with the gesture he used the warrant officer signature phrase,

"Watch this shit."

The warrant officer allowed the mechanic to almost screw up the operation, then intervened to show the incompetent soldier how to "Unfuck himself."

One of the First Sergeants I served with in Iraq told me, "I can look at a uniform and how a soldier wears it, private or general, don't matter, and tell you that [soldier's] military career." 

I could not read an entire career from a camouflage uniform, but I could make accurate judgments in milliseconds about a soldier's current state of readiness for the job or mission at hand.  That's what sergeants do.  They judge you or they are asleep.

Judging is everywhere in life there is expertise.  My rule for watching movies is I don't watch movies on subjects in which I have expertise.  So I don't usually watch war movies.  Too many details from wear of the uniform to weapons that never run out of ammo drive me nuts.  And I judge.

So I watch movies about doctors, detectives, spies and sailors.  I have no expertise in these fields, so when a spy makes a glaring procedural error that would cause a cop to cringe, I am blissfully ignorant and enjoy the show.

Of course, this judgment ability is not just to enjoy assailing the incompetent, but for survival. I race bicycles. In races and in training, bicycles ride inches apart at speeds up to 50 mph.  Ten of my 34 broken bones happened in a split second at 50mph when I misjudged a pass I was making and in a few seconds was lying in a ditch bleeding with a broken neck waiting for a MEDEVAC helicopter.

Racers who ride in packs are judging each other all the time. It's a matter of survival. In a bicycle crash, the guy who causes the crash usually does not fall. The guy in front who brakes, or swerves, or drifts, clips the front wheel of the rider behind.  The rider behind falls. The rider in front keeps going.

When I hear or overhear someone asking, "Is she judging me?" I think, "How cute. You really think there is a chance she's not?"