Part of my morning routine (after hitting the snooze button several times), is scrolling through the latest Twitter and Facebook posts on my phone (mostly as a way of postponing the actual getting-out-of-bed moment). Having been very thoughtfully woken by the cat at 9 AM Friday morning (who went off and put herself to sleep after ensuring that I was irrevocably awake), I signed onto Twitter smack in the middle of what read more like the plot of an action movie than anything that could happen in real life, and that niggling, indecipherable Thing that had been stirring since Monday screamed out in full force.
I missed 9/11. Sort of. I was asleep for the big stuff. The planes, the buildings. I woke up to my father's proclamation that there'd be a tragedy and the citizens of my small town panicking because an unidentified plane was circling over head and not responding to the local private airport. I remember watching the news after that and having the feeling that Something Very Bad was coming, and the people to fear weren't necessarily the Other Outside. Don't get me wrong - I felt for the people who'd died and been injured, but there wasn't anything I could do about that and in my often too practical way of looking at the world, the thing to focus on was the What Next.
I missed the Boston bombing, too. I wandered back to my flat after a day of uni and the weekly ritual TGIF and cinema around midnight and reconnected with social media. The array of posts about fortitude and resilience and other such sentiments was the first clue that something was up. Keeping up with what happens back home ("home" being used in a very broad, general sense here) is tricky these days because all the social connecting gives me more UK and US, but I'm a resourceful little scavenger and managed to dig up the fact that there'd been an explosion at the Boston marathon. The Indecipherable Thing poked its head out of the shadows and whispered something far too quiet to make out just yet, but I was uneasy. Again, falling back on my often too practical view, I pushed the uneasiness back with facts. Technically, something bad had happened back "home", but I don't know anyone in Boston. It's pretty far away from my point of origin, and it's really far away from where I am now. But the Indecipherable Thing kept staring.
I lurk around Amanda Palmer's internet space with a sporadic dedication. She's talented, intelligent, and more often than not, gives me hope for the human race by reminding me there are decent people out there working to remind people there are still decent people. Last night, I wandered over, read through her recent blog posts, and the Indecipherable Thing was named:
The weeks before Boston, I'd spent a lot of time dodging any form of social media and had gotten pretty damn close to hiding every person in the UK I know because I couldn't handle what was being said there. For those who don't know, Margaret Thatcher died. That day, and the day after, I walked away from the internet. I didn't get it. I don't get it. From my perspective, an old woman with dementia died, and regardless, that fact kept making me remember sitting next to the bed of an old man with dementia not knowing what to say to all the people trying so hard to be kind while wishing they'd stop.
The personal memory-trigger aside, I couldn't reconcile so many people I knew, respected, admired, and loved putting so much energy into pouring so much hate into the world over the death of another human being. In a conversation with my mother that afternoon, I tried to pin down exactly what about it bothered me, how I thought people should be acting instead. The closest I came was to say: It lacks professionalism - that unspoken code of behaviour we all (or most of us) automatically put on - if there can be such a thing as a professional human being. Though it might not be such a bad thing if we all brought a little more professionalism to our personal lives.
Death makes me uncomfortable because it's emotional. Grief I don't particularly understand well. A lot of the finer emotions I don't understand well. A classmate and friend of several of my family members and friends died the week before and I felt incredibly awkward about it. I didn't know what to say to them when they talked about it, so generally I didn't say anything. I've found that's the safest option. Usually. But even with my emotional dyslexia, I can't escape the fact that whatever my feeling (or lack thereof), this is a person.
And that was what I thought while watching the celebrations of Margaret Thatcher's death. I can't comprehend hating someone that much, let alone someone I don't know personally. The worst I can manage is a certain ambivalence. Trying to reconcile my feelings about the people in question with their actions, which in my slightly off-kilter perception were no less than morally abhorrent, has been a difficult process that I haven't quite resolved within myself. It has, however, made me think a lot about hate, and about the difference between who a person is and what a person does.
People have the ability to do some truly horrible things, and sometimes they act on this ability. Does that automatically make them a horrible person? Are we ever able to judge who is good and who is bad, who is deserving of mercy and forgiveness and who should be condemned without consideration? Are any of us ever completely free of blame and guilt? If you were standing in public trial, what would you wish they didn't know, and who would you want to cast the deciding vote?
That's the tricky thing about morality, and it's something that makes living with humanity particularly difficult for me. My morality doesn't have shades of grey. The world does. The world is coated in shades of shades so fine only the most discerning eye can spot the difference. This isn't to say I haven't violated my own moral code, or that I haven't forgiven Sins in the Eyes of Sashi in others. But there's a certain... Need for consistency of intent, I suppose.
Nothing is accomplished by matching hate with hate. Spewing out vitriol and spite because you dislike someone's actions doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make you better than your target, and it doesn't lend any more strength to your argument. When people do things - petty things, awful things, downright tragic things - what's needed is dignity and decency. People who have the strength to, not necessarily forgive, but rise above whatever wrong's been done and, for lack of better phrasing, take that too practical view.
Maybe the negativity is nothing new. Maybe it's the internet. Maybe it's social media. Maybe it's all this talk about the importance of the individual and taking care of the common good and all those other things they say that contradict and complicate but.
There's just so much of it.
I've been paying more attention to what people post lately. Their link shares and likes and status updates. In all honesty, if it weren't for certain obligations, I'd have flipped the switch on social media months ago. There's the negativity. The hypocrisy. The you have to respect me and my views but I can hit below the belt any time I want and that's okay. The propaganda. The knee-jerk reactions. The fear. The conspiracies. The it's so cool to be jaded and hard. The jokes that aren't offensive because it's just a joke and you're being too sensitive. The competition for who can be more right. The hackles raising so I can bite first even when no one's attacking because I've been taught that's how the world works. The rumours. The fighting. The absolute, inexplicable joy in hate.
Hate directed at total strangers. Individuals you maybe know a handful of things about, or maybe just one thing. Generalised groupings of anonymous faces you heard something about that may or may not be true. Or maybe just had a bad experience with one member of that group, so that means they're all bad.
How does that not exhaust you?
I don't have it in me to hate. I don't know why, but I don't. I've tried. There are a few people I'd really like to hate, but I can't do it. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. But I get caught on the other perspective and playing devil's advocate. I can usually see where another person is coming from, how they made certain conclusions and why they made certain decisions. I may not agree with them. I may not like them. But it makes them human, and once you see someone as a human being - as a person just like you with fuck ups and flaws and wants and needs and insecurities and favourite foods and families and pet gerbils - it makes it really, really hard to hate.
This particular inability of mine has drawn more flak and criticism than any of my other shortcomings. Something about that just doesn't seem quite right.
I missed 9/11. Sort of. I was asleep for the big stuff. The planes, the buildings. I woke up to my father's proclamation that there'd be a tragedy and the citizens of my small town panicking because an unidentified plane was circling over head and not responding to the local private airport. I remember watching the news after that and having the feeling that Something Very Bad was coming, and the people to fear weren't necessarily the Other Outside. Don't get me wrong - I felt for the people who'd died and been injured, but there wasn't anything I could do about that and in my often too practical way of looking at the world, the thing to focus on was the What Next.
I missed the Boston bombing, too. I wandered back to my flat after a day of uni and the weekly ritual TGIF and cinema around midnight and reconnected with social media. The array of posts about fortitude and resilience and other such sentiments was the first clue that something was up. Keeping up with what happens back home ("home" being used in a very broad, general sense here) is tricky these days because all the social connecting gives me more UK and US, but I'm a resourceful little scavenger and managed to dig up the fact that there'd been an explosion at the Boston marathon. The Indecipherable Thing poked its head out of the shadows and whispered something far too quiet to make out just yet, but I was uneasy. Again, falling back on my often too practical view, I pushed the uneasiness back with facts. Technically, something bad had happened back "home", but I don't know anyone in Boston. It's pretty far away from my point of origin, and it's really far away from where I am now. But the Indecipherable Thing kept staring.
I lurk around Amanda Palmer's internet space with a sporadic dedication. She's talented, intelligent, and more often than not, gives me hope for the human race by reminding me there are decent people out there working to remind people there are still decent people. Last night, I wandered over, read through her recent blog posts, and the Indecipherable Thing was named:
"i bet the world is going to get worse now because people are going to start yelling and doing more bad shit to each other."That was it. That was the thought I had 12 years ago watching the news and the government and the people around me getting more and more frantic in their fear and hate. That was the thing I'd been uneasy about for the past week. People are going to start yelling and doing more bad shit. And it made me wonder if we're ever going to get past that, if there's ever going to be a moment again when bad things happen and we aren't terrified that the world we know has turned into something awful and different and scary.
The weeks before Boston, I'd spent a lot of time dodging any form of social media and had gotten pretty damn close to hiding every person in the UK I know because I couldn't handle what was being said there. For those who don't know, Margaret Thatcher died. That day, and the day after, I walked away from the internet. I didn't get it. I don't get it. From my perspective, an old woman with dementia died, and regardless, that fact kept making me remember sitting next to the bed of an old man with dementia not knowing what to say to all the people trying so hard to be kind while wishing they'd stop.
The personal memory-trigger aside, I couldn't reconcile so many people I knew, respected, admired, and loved putting so much energy into pouring so much hate into the world over the death of another human being. In a conversation with my mother that afternoon, I tried to pin down exactly what about it bothered me, how I thought people should be acting instead. The closest I came was to say: It lacks professionalism - that unspoken code of behaviour we all (or most of us) automatically put on - if there can be such a thing as a professional human being. Though it might not be such a bad thing if we all brought a little more professionalism to our personal lives.
Death makes me uncomfortable because it's emotional. Grief I don't particularly understand well. A lot of the finer emotions I don't understand well. A classmate and friend of several of my family members and friends died the week before and I felt incredibly awkward about it. I didn't know what to say to them when they talked about it, so generally I didn't say anything. I've found that's the safest option. Usually. But even with my emotional dyslexia, I can't escape the fact that whatever my feeling (or lack thereof), this is a person.
And that was what I thought while watching the celebrations of Margaret Thatcher's death. I can't comprehend hating someone that much, let alone someone I don't know personally. The worst I can manage is a certain ambivalence. Trying to reconcile my feelings about the people in question with their actions, which in my slightly off-kilter perception were no less than morally abhorrent, has been a difficult process that I haven't quite resolved within myself. It has, however, made me think a lot about hate, and about the difference between who a person is and what a person does.
People have the ability to do some truly horrible things, and sometimes they act on this ability. Does that automatically make them a horrible person? Are we ever able to judge who is good and who is bad, who is deserving of mercy and forgiveness and who should be condemned without consideration? Are any of us ever completely free of blame and guilt? If you were standing in public trial, what would you wish they didn't know, and who would you want to cast the deciding vote?
That's the tricky thing about morality, and it's something that makes living with humanity particularly difficult for me. My morality doesn't have shades of grey. The world does. The world is coated in shades of shades so fine only the most discerning eye can spot the difference. This isn't to say I haven't violated my own moral code, or that I haven't forgiven Sins in the Eyes of Sashi in others. But there's a certain... Need for consistency of intent, I suppose.
Nothing is accomplished by matching hate with hate. Spewing out vitriol and spite because you dislike someone's actions doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make you better than your target, and it doesn't lend any more strength to your argument. When people do things - petty things, awful things, downright tragic things - what's needed is dignity and decency. People who have the strength to, not necessarily forgive, but rise above whatever wrong's been done and, for lack of better phrasing, take that too practical view.
Maybe the negativity is nothing new. Maybe it's the internet. Maybe it's social media. Maybe it's all this talk about the importance of the individual and taking care of the common good and all those other things they say that contradict and complicate but.
There's just so much of it.
I've been paying more attention to what people post lately. Their link shares and likes and status updates. In all honesty, if it weren't for certain obligations, I'd have flipped the switch on social media months ago. There's the negativity. The hypocrisy. The you have to respect me and my views but I can hit below the belt any time I want and that's okay. The propaganda. The knee-jerk reactions. The fear. The conspiracies. The it's so cool to be jaded and hard. The jokes that aren't offensive because it's just a joke and you're being too sensitive. The competition for who can be more right. The hackles raising so I can bite first even when no one's attacking because I've been taught that's how the world works. The rumours. The fighting. The absolute, inexplicable joy in hate.
Hate directed at total strangers. Individuals you maybe know a handful of things about, or maybe just one thing. Generalised groupings of anonymous faces you heard something about that may or may not be true. Or maybe just had a bad experience with one member of that group, so that means they're all bad.
How does that not exhaust you?
I don't have it in me to hate. I don't know why, but I don't. I've tried. There are a few people I'd really like to hate, but I can't do it. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. But I get caught on the other perspective and playing devil's advocate. I can usually see where another person is coming from, how they made certain conclusions and why they made certain decisions. I may not agree with them. I may not like them. But it makes them human, and once you see someone as a human being - as a person just like you with fuck ups and flaws and wants and needs and insecurities and favourite foods and families and pet gerbils - it makes it really, really hard to hate.
This particular inability of mine has drawn more flak and criticism than any of my other shortcomings. Something about that just doesn't seem quite right.
*Loud round of applause for the magpie*
ReplyDeleteI have a kind of rule about death. Sometimes, I GET IT - people hate. True, I understand where you're coming from with not getting truly HATING someone you've never really known. But I have this hard-and-fast rule: do not hate the dead. Once you're dead, there are no sides anymore. They were a person and they have been lost, and you don't need to LIKE THEM or even PRAY FOR THEM or any of that crap - but you need to respect that they existed and they're gone now. And if asked, you have to be ready to bow your head and have a moment of silence in which you recognize A PERSON IS GONE and they will not be coming back. When we lose sight of that person-ness, we become much more capable of killing, or wanting others to kill.
Poor old Mags, she was so sick. I am glad she's dead, but for her own sake. My grandmother had Alzheimer's - it's not nicknamed The Long Goodbye for no reason. Dementia is hard, it's horrible to watch, horrible to experience, and there's a point at which I have to say: Good for you, Mags. Good luck in whatever Beyond awaits you.
I find myself worried as you describe above A LOT. I get nervous about the fact that people in the US don't seem to care (REALLY care, I mean, care enough to think about what buying a pair of GODDAMNED TOMS SHOES ACTUALLY MEANS for the people they're trying to help, what it means to go to a "third world" country to dig a well as if they with their IPHONE AND THEIR LACK OF ANY EXPERIENCE OF PHYSICAL LABOR OR WORKING THE EARTH know more about it than the people who live there, when they look at a young girl's inability to go to school as her not being allowed to go to school rather than asking themselves what kind of survival needs she has to fulfill before she can take any time for herself, when they treat women in burkas as if they have no minds of their own, when they call indigenous peoples in parts of South America heathens because they have so "bastardized" Christianity...I could go on) what kind of suffering goes on in the rest of the world. The marathon bomb killed two people, and this is not to say that those deaths weren't tragic, but the consolation note from Syria makes a wonderful point: WE HAVE NO IDEA, and we don't really seem to care.
And I suppose I can get why it is that we seem to insist so much upon our own humanity over others - who are just numbers on the news - but it doesn't make it feel better to me.
And now we've got a whole new group of people to pick on. Swear to ALLFATHER ODIN HIMSELF, we go to war against the Chechens...well. I'm either gonna have to become a nun and go pray for the souls of all Mankind, or I'm going to have to enter politics to try to get people to see sense, and I don't really want to do either of those. Nor would they necessarily be helpful, either ;)
I found the consolation note from Syria quite moving for a lot of reasons. It made a point, as you said, but it also showed a group of people who know suffering showing empathy for another group without competition or "my trials are worse than yours" or any of that. Just a very basic "we know it's scary but you'll be okay". There is not nearly enough of that in this world.
DeleteMeanwhile there are the fires in West Texas which have been pushed off to the side because it's not as dramatic, or something. It wasn't a deliberate act, but people died and were injured and could't go to their homes. Is that any less tragic?
The Fred Rogers quote keeps floating around - look for the helpers. Yes, it's good that when the shit hits the fan there are people who rush to help fix it, that there's this drive to unite and comfort. But when the rubble is swept up and the wounds are stitched up, when there's nothing left to fix, how united will we stay?
I have a very good friend who gets quite upset about all the awful things that happen in the world. I have to tell him frequently to just shut off the news because it upsets him so much. I have a slightly more pragmatic view. There are awful things in the world. Things are done to people that should never be done to any living creature. I can't do anything about those things. I have no power over other governments or groups or institutions. But I do have control over myself, my life, and what I put out into the world. I would much rather that contribution be something that makes other people - as many of them as possible, from as many places in as many colours with as many thoughts and beliefs and passions as are out there - feel good about themselves than adding another kick to a long-abused horse.
I've contemplated going into politics a few times. It'd be carrying on something of a family legacy if I did, but I think I'm a little too blunt for the actual politic arena. ;)
On some level, the only think I can do is have faith in the inexorable march of history - things will change, and the way things are going, they seem like they will be changing for the (what I would consider to be) the better.
DeleteYeahhhhhhh...I feel ya on the politician thing. Too blunt, too idealistic, and too fed up with the BS politicians tend to spew.
*hugs*