The Elephant In The Room

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

So said Friedrich Nietzsche.  I remember reading these words in high school.  I wasn't a huge Nietzsche fan, but much of what he wrote spoke to something in me.  Even before I truly understood it.  As I have grown and matured and gained life experience, I've grown to love his work.  According to Nietzsche, there are no facts, only the interpretation of events.  We all come to a situation with our own upbringing and biases.  And when I say "we all", I mean ourselves as well as others.  That is a difficult thing to understand.  Most people don't fully understand why they say and do what they do.  They accept their convictions as Truth without reflecting where these convictions come from, historically and evolutionarily. 

I see a trend in our country of extremities of ideologies and it frightens me.  We have adopted this sort of either/or philosophy.  This is doubly frightening because much of our morals and ethics seem to be formed and solidified due to reactions to emotive soundbites and Internet memes.  These kind of morals breed bigotry and hate.  They burn bridges rather than create them.  Another lesson I've learned from reading Nietzsche is that we must take care when fighting monsters not to become one ourselves.  But in the current political climate, it seems we are poked and prodded at all times by poisonous monsters demanding we join one of them in their vitriol.  In trying to prove we have The Truth, we become the monsters we are railing against.  We lose our capacity for empathy.  And what's more, the monsters we initially set out to slay are winning.  Politicians work to maintain the status quo while we bicker back and forth and nothing is ever accomplished. 

In order to uphold the Constitution, we must begin to be proactive, rather than reactive, in protecting the rights of the majority AND the rights of the few.  If there is one thing that the Occupy Movement accomplished, it was changing our dialogue, at least temporarily, from soundbites about cutting taxes and spending for crucial institutions, to the idea that there is a vast economic inequality in our country.  Until we stop letting the plutocracy define our economic beliefs, class warfare will never go away.

I wish we could take that understanding beyond economics and bring it into our moral and ethical understandings.  If we could understand that our own convictions and beliefs are affected by by decades of biases and moral development based on fear and subjugation, we would be more empathetic and understanding toward others.  We would understand that soundbites only work to further the gap between understanding.  We would know that our "Truth" is not everyone's "Truth".  And that's okay.  But by understanding that, you can allow others to live their lives according to their own understanding of truth and morals.

Keeping homosexuality in check and passing along our prejudices to keep it a taboo achieves nothing of any human value.  There was a time in our country when people were uncomfortable drinking out of a fountain with a black person.  This wasn't considered bigotry because it was a widely upheld belief that black people did not deserve the same treatment as their white counterparts.  People opposed to the Gay Rights Movement, much like those opposed to the Civil Rights Movement, have many reasons that justify their deep-seated bigotry.  They dress it up in pretty phrases like "protecting traditional marriage" and wrap it in religious dogma.  But beneath all of that, it is bigotry plain and simple. 


It is easy for me to see this and be appalled by said bigotry.  But what I have had to remind myself of is that I have come to my understanding of this, and many other polarizing issues, from a different background and set of biases than the people I am "fighting".  To them, I am the monster.  In reality, neither of us are the monster in this scenario.  The faulty maxims on which we have built our lives are the monsters, and until we understand that, we cannot slay them.

In Pluto's Allegory of the Cave, a man is experiencing life through shadows projected on a cave wall as people walk past a fire behind him.  His whole life, he believed he was truly living in the world, until he was told that there was a great big world full of sunshine and dimension and color just outside of the cave opening.  His journey out of the cave was difficult and painful.  It made him uncomfortable and long for the safety of his cave.  But in the end he realized it was better for him to leave his cave behind.

We all have our "caves" we must leave behind.  It is scary and difficult and part of us will always yearn for the safety of our "caves".  I have my own caves that I have had to claw my way out of.  Gay Rights was one of them.  But I have many more.  Still, it hurts me that there are people who feel justified in marginalizing an entire group of people based on their beliefs.  Our government's job is to protect our right to freedom insofar as our actions do not infringe upon the rights of others.  Religious freedom only goes so far.  The moment a group begins attacking the rights of a minority based upon their religious beliefs, that freedom ends.  Understanding that people with these beliefs about homosexuality have a biological legacy and generations of baggage behind those beliefs is one thing.  Allowing them to legislate based on their religion is quite another.

I will end with one more thought.   I hope to pass on many things to my daughter.  My love of literature and music.  My propensity to break into showtunes and dance madly around the house.  My deep-felt need to create.  But there are things I try everyday not to pass onto her.  Some are easy to avoid.  My fear of heights, for instance, and my hatred of mushrooms.  Some are much harder.  Biases and prejudices I'm not even aware I have are the hardest.  My own lack of empathy and understanding to people who have different opinions is a close second.  But these are also the most important aspects of myself to NOT pass on to her.  My hope is that she will be better at loving and accepting and understanding than I am.  I want to leave her a world with less bigotry and prejudice.  And I worry because it seems those things are growing daily.  I've thought a lot about how to help stop it.  I'm still thinking.  I don't have all of this figured out, but I know that it is crucial to open a dialogue based on actual understanding and hearing where the other side is coming from.  Understanding that our understanding of the truth is not absolute and others may have something valid to contribute to our quest for said truth.


I'll close with this picture because it is a reminder to me why I have to uphold my beliefs and put my opinion out there even when I am scared.  I am protecting my family from hate and small-mindedness (on both sides), and reminding myself the reason why I can't give up on finding a solution.