I remember the first time I was told to look away. When I was very young, I saw a man in a wheelchair at the library and my mom told me not to stare at him because it was rude. I soon learned that there were many different types of people I wasn't supposed to look at--homeless people, non-White people, old people, people with illnesses, people with physical abnormalities, people who acted a bit differently than me. Soon "don't stare" morphed into "pretend they don't exist." I began to carry with me this immense amount of guilt--I felt guilty when I didn't look at a homeless man on the street, and I felt guilty when I did. Why are we not allowed to look? Why do we feel this guilt? Are we truly being respectful by not looking?
Instead of being told to not stare, I want to tell others to learn to acknowledge difference. There are people out there who operate or look differently from you, and differently from most of the people around you, and there are reasons for that. Their differences do not make them lesser than you, or anyone for that matter. You should not pity them for their difference, or feel ashamed because your life might be "easier" than theirs in some respect. They make do and try to flourish given their particular circumstances, in the same way that you do. We are all dealt different cards in life, and our sense of normality is unique to ourselves. It is okay to look. Humans are drawn to novelty, to things that deviate from what is "common" or deemed "normal" by society. The more you look, the less novel these differences become. Not only should you look, but you should engage. Learn from people whose lived experiences deviate from yours. Connect with similarities you share. I just held interviews with a handful of homeless individuals in Syracuse, and one man said that the worst thing about being homeless was that he was invisible. People pretended as if he didn't exist at all. He said he would rather someone say hello to him and give him no money than rush past without making eye contact. I've also read articles written by people who use wheelchairs, and how difficult it is to get people to even look at them. This made me realize that many people’s attempts to not be "rude" can lead them to completely disregard the humanity of many groups of people. Pretending people don't exist is not "kindness." It is a thinly veiled attempt to evade thinking about our prejudices and discomforts, from recognizing the humanity of those who are different from ourselves. Recognizing humanity is an active process. It will feel uncomfortable. I'd like to think of myself as someone who ~actively acknowledges others~, but I still struggle to make eye contact. I struggled today to converse with a particular homeless man after he told me he just got out of prison. But I asked his name. I asked about his family. He called me his sister because we both had green eyes. If I hadn't looked at him, I never would have realized the similarity.
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there’s just a lot of hurt in this country, and this world, right now. and saying something about it seems fruitless and unnecessary. nothing will come of my sentiments. words don't bring people back from the dead. i suppose my attitude has been defeatist and heavy lately. i can't turn on the news or open my laptop without being bombarded with images of the latest black person who has been beaten or murdered or disenfranchised or driven to suicide. it happens everyday, in every state, on every square inch of this godforsaken country. conversations are often centered around providing white people with definitive evidence that "racism is alive and well!!!" the white people then defend their disbelief or shake their heads solemnly, saying how terrible it is that we're always one rally away from a police state, that black people's lives are viewed as inherently criminal and worthless, that the institutions that underpin our society are specifically developed to maintain white supremacy.
i am not doing enough. my fellow white people are not doing enough. my fellow white people who walk into churches and end the lives of nine people who are worshipping God are an atrocity. we have the privilege of considering racism as an intellectual exercise. we can hide our ignorance behind jargon, we can pretend ideologies are just harmless thoughts with zero repercussions, we can distance ourselves from the line of fire, we can close the book or turn off the tv and divorce ourselves from oppression. when you're black, oppression is your lived experience. you don't get to earmark the page and return to it later when you're ready. malcolm x said it right decades ago: "I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are 'proving' that they are 'with us.' But the hard truth is this isn't helping to solve America's racist problem. The Negroes aren't the racists. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their 'proving' of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America's racism really is -- and that's in their own home communities; America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work." racism continues because white people allow it in their homes, their communities, their country. perhaps you feel absolved because you never gave your explicit consent to this shit system. your consent is your silence, your complacency, your willful ignorance. shaking your head accomplishes nothing. now correcting your racist family members and friends (and even yourself)? that's step one. keep going. so often in our lives we rehearse statements like: "how did I not see that coming?" "i should've known better!" "how could I be so fucking stupid?" "why did I let this happen again?" but what we conveniently forget is that life does not come equipped with an instruction manual. every other moment of the day we are forced into foreign situations and we must act according to our best judgment. we're making informed guesses at best and bumbling blindly at worst.
do not criticize yourself too harshly for not acting perfectly in every situation. you were not born a soothsayer. you have no way of knowing every single consequence of your actions. no way of knowing how people will react. no way of knowing what the best course of action would be. no way of assessing your motives or the motives of those around you. of course, once you have learned the consequences, seen how someone reacted, discovered the best course of action, or uncovered the motives of others, it seems too obvious. but the cliche is right - hindsight is 20/20. forgive yourself for not knowing any better, because you didn't know any better. understand that you're doing the best you can, and that's all you can really expect from yourself. contrary to popular belief, you do not know yourself better than anyone else. honestly, you have a very vague notion of who you are. human beings are not objective entities; we are a mess of "traits" and "personality characteristics" ascribed to us by other people who have had very subjective experiences of us.
who you believe yourself to be is largely a product of your self narrative, or the script you rehearse in your mind every other minute of the day. every time you look in the mirror and pick apart your physical flaws, every time you call yourself idiotic for fucking up an exam, every time you proclaim yourself to be unlovable or incapable of love, every time you label yourself as unsuccessful, that is adding to your self narrative. if i could make an educated guess, i'd say that most of our narratives are horrendously negative. so the 'self' that you know is probably a pretty shitty human being. i know this quote is overused, but if someone treated you the way you treat yourself, you'd never be friends with that person?? you'd wonder what the hell you had ever done to deserve that treatment. you'd probably come up with arguments to protect your ego, citing instances in which you were intelligent, compassionate, humble, dedicated, whatever. so why is it when you say horrendous things about yourself you never think twice? it's illogical. it is not a requirement to hate yourself better than anyone else in order to be a "realistic"/"acceptable" human being. get to know yourself better. make an attempt to acknowledge the good in yourself. extend some of your kindness inward. you deserve it. i'll tell you something the Career Center leaves out. i know this not from personal experience, but from talking to people who do. it does not matter what you major in. let me say it again: it does not matter what you major in. so if your hours of tears and rote memorization don't matter, what the hell does? your ability to work productively in a workplace, act as a leader, interact positively with other human beings, problem solve, and think critically. basically all that basic shit they used to grade you on in middle school.
i'll tell you something else: stop planning. stop thinking that you'll have your 401k, investments, mortgage, marriage license, loans, stable career, and will all in order by the time you graduate college. not only does our educational system fail to teach us anything useful (e.g. how to fill out a tax form, change a tire, make a prenup, or cry quietly in the shower), it makes you feel bad for not inherently knowing those things. if you think you're the only one bumbling through adulthood, you're not. join the club and stay awhile! you'll be here until you retire. a large amount of stress will be taken off your shoulders if you learn to accept ambiguity. you've survived this long and i assure you, you'll figure this shit out as you go. call your mom and ask her what all those letters and numbers mean on your mortgage, ask your boss what you're supposed to be doing, do some internet searches (pro tip: yahoo! answers doesn't extinguish it's usefulness after college). you cannot know the future. if you think you'll end up as a spanish teacher, you'll probably be the CEO of Unicef one day. who the hell knows? you don't. so take the days as they come. you'll figure it out. now finish eating that bag of chips and take a deep breath. let today be the day that you give yourself permission to be hated. this is no simple task. the next time someone attacks your character, resist the urge to defend yourself; erase the list of reasons why they ought to love you. say: you know what. you are right.
how people feel about you is less of a reflection of who you are and more of a reflection of themselves and their reaction to you. every person that you meet does not experience you in this completely objective way. that kid who sits next to you in class, half-conscious every MWF at 8:00 AM, has not seen you at your most glorious and most terrible. they've strung together random interactions with you, formed a judgment, determined who you are as an entity, and colored in the missing parts with their biases. stop being at the mercy of people's perceptions of you. stop getting on your knees and begging for the good graces of every person you happen to have met. i've been despised by more people than i know about -- math teachers, ex-lovers, ex-friends, some guy who doesn't know my name but knows that i am a little too loud for his liking. good for fucking them. they'll be missing out on my tri-yearly meltdowns, social commentary, and too-big heart. i have met some of the most wonderful human beings on this planet simply because i did not invest all of my efforts into convincing people to love me who were hell-bent on despising me. i love those who love me back. i throw up my hands to the ones who hate me and say, "i am no less because of your perception of me." try it out one day. i think the most profound thing about human beings is that in the face of incredible adversity, they continue on. many animals do not have the choice, but we can consciously choose to be alive. humans, in one way or another, implicitly sustain themselves on a hope of something better. we've got to admire ourselves for that.
see, the issue is that you’re smart. though smart merely implies memorization or mastery of a particular subject. the larger issue is that you’re intelligent. you have the ability to articulate your thoughts, whether it be on paper or in spoken word or even internally. you have the desire to know, the incessant need to succeed, and the cynicism to ineffectively manage your own faults. and most importantly, you think. you think all fucking day and thinking consumes those fragile hours where you are supposed to be unconscious. you have written twenty books in your mind, at minimum, and you have conducted a full-scale analysis of every individual you’ve ever encountered. you’ve concluded that a vast majority of humans are idiots. perhaps that wasn’t the politically correct terminology. also see: dumbshits, airheads, trash, motherfuckers, bigots, wastes of space. a vast majority of humans aren’t even worth the five minutes it takes to conduct a monotonous, frivolous, pointless, empty conversation with them. they do not think. they follow the speed limit and blindly shoot at anyone who violates their conventional morality. they drink enough beer to keep their neural connections at the bare minimum and to fill their memories with empty black spaces. they are the entitled frat boys who become the entitled CEOs of monopolistic oil companies that strip our biosphere of any remaining life. they are the dogma suckling temple-goers, the rapists who smear their victim’s spirit all over the fucking walls, the dictators who cut the ribbon before newly built gas chambers, the people in monochrome business suits who can’t bare to look out the window, the hicks down by the river who wouldn’t know what to do with a book if they got their hands on one. these people cannot think of virtue. though you, the one of intelligence, will spend your days convincing yourself that you are not. you will keep looking to the stars and feeling insignificant because you are not of greatness yet.
you are nothing to the universe. all humans want is to be important. they want to amount to something. they want their infinite amount of moments in the sun. they will sell their nonexistent souls to the devil (or corporate America) just to be an endnote in a history book. they will make obscene gestures behind newscasters just so they can be seen.
Hi mom, hi dad. they will be newscasters and let misinformation spew out of their mouth because we r r e a a a a d a n n n d are s e e e e e n but w e r e f u s s s s e to t h i i i n k. these humans, filled with folly and cynicism, make grandiose plans to amount to something. but being something requires time and money and there’s never enough of either. they have sex and produce 1.3 children just so they can be something to someone. and if they end up amounting to nothing, at least their offspring can live out their unrequited aspirations. they don’t quite understand why it is that they want to be important. if someone doesn’t remember that you existed, did you ever exist at all? if you don’t add to the pool of human greatness, will you be equivalent to a deer that got hit by a semi and is lying in the middle of the road? Oh honey, look! That’s so sad. but they’re already driving on, scraping you from the edges of their short term memory, heading somewhere to be something. you were an accident. this entire species was one mistake, a fluke of nature, a genetic plot twist. first there is a little evolution and before you know it, the brain is naming itself. isn’t it a bit peculiar that nature eventually produced something that could outsmart it? ever since humans came around, they’ve been formulating ways to destroy what created them. death to the atmosphere, death to brain cells, death to god. isn’t it lovely that humans are one of the only organisms capable of comprehending death? the fact that we acknowledge that the only reason we are here is to replicate ourselves and then rot before we waste any more precious resources is pretty noble. we carry the burden of consciousness, the capacity to know that we are finite and essentially meaningless. nobody will burn in hell. there is no plot in the Garden of Eden with your name on it. the world would be better off if you didn’t reproduce. after all, the greatest mistake and most profound miracle that evolution has produced is the human. and this miracle is out to destroy any trace of life. nature cannot be sustained by thought. though it’s an awful shame that such a profoundly powerful organ has to exist in such a fragile world.
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