I'm not referring to the internet, although it is a good dramatization of what I'm referring to. I'm talking about our interconnectedness. Every "We are One" "No man is an island" "three degrees of separation" "a butterfly flaps its wings in...." etc, etc, saying-- cliched, bumpersticker-like, hackneyed and over-sentimental though it may be, may also be quite true.
The thing about cliches and stereotypes that make them a problem is not that they are false or wrong or completely ridiculous. The problem is the glimmer of truth. It makes them seductive, and it makes them routine and acceptable. With stereotypes, we accept that glimmer of truth and use it to base all our future judgements about the person or thing or event it stereotypes. Sort of like saying "all carrots are orange". There are a lot of orange carrots, but what the stereotype does is make everyone suggest that the non-orange carrot is the exception, or that by not being orange, it must not be a carrot at all. Of course, we chose which color of carrots to propagate and which ones not to. Reality is, a green carrot, or a white carrot or a red and purple carrot is both possible and normal and a carrot. The carrot has been stereotyped and now is used to judge all carrots. Unfortunately, most of our stereotypes are about groups of people, not vegetables.
With cliches, instead of it becoming more meaningful, it becomes more invisible. Its meaning is lost in its repetition. It's like yesterday's buzzword gone stale. I think that is why I hate buzzwords. The popularity of the buzzword, how "in the know" it makes the person feel is much more important than the meaning of the word.
BUT.....
We are all connected. All events are connected. Nothing is without impact on the world around us, no matter how small we feel. No matter how powerless or uninvolved or hopeless.
The internet is blowing up a Chris Rock interview about how it isn't black people that have changed, it is white people. He could have said it isn't women....its men, it isn't Mexicans....its the U.S. citizens, and the only false note might have been that there is a single group anywhere that hasn't changed a little.
But his thesis was correct---there have always been nonwhite, non-male non-heterosexual, non-christian and non-moneyed people that could be the president or the head of a huge bank or multimillion-dollar corporation etc, etc, etc. What has been missing has always been opportunity. Opportunity---what I used to call luck--- but luck implies more of a chance that I have that opportunity than actually exists.
I went to public school, where we were taught that we could all be anything we wanted if we just applied ourselves. No one ever told us that we were not in the right school to get into the right university. No one mentioned that our chances of becoming anything more than a skilled worker making just enough to not need assistance from the government was highly unlikely. And not one person in our little class made it to the top. Some of the girls were quite beautiful, and while they married, many of them for a lifetime, they did not marry those men that were most sought after, they married men they met in their lives, and loved, and raised families with, and they will die without ever being the president or the CEO or a powerful woman in some other public venue. Some of the people were very smart, and they are doing well, making more than the state average, in jobs with actual titles, but percentile-wise, they are at about the 80th. Only a couple of them became entrepreneurs and they started with families that were the same and three people that chose physician careers--and yes they had relatives that had done the same, have made it close to the top. And Chris was right---they were all white men. White female physicians make less than their male counterparts for whatever reason.
The assumption, long held, and well protected has always been that the white race and the male member of that race is superior to every other race and all women. When Darwin developed his theories, which had nothing to do with race and everything to do with species, it was highjacked almost immediately by white men with a goal of proving their right to power and prestige. They also used it (survival of the fittest always translates to survival of the meanest, least ethical, least compassionate beast in the forest although in nature it may just mean the most adaptable and least conspicous) to explain every atrocity and nightmare they ever perpetrated upon other races, or people in places where the culture was different, the religion was different, or the person was not male. That is not to say that in places that are governed by non-white people, that there is goodness. Social Darwinism seems to have been adored for thousands of years before it had a name. The biggest bully with the most friends wins.
So what about this whole--we are all in this together? We are. We are all on the same planet and we share that planet with over 3 millions other species of life. While we humans like to find patterns, put things and people in categories, and make everything hierarchical, there is no evidence that race exists except in our own minds. The hierarchies that we create for the sexes, races, religions, and other us/them scenarios---part of our need to categorize and make everything better than or worse than ourselves and our group is no more meaningful than Friday Night High School Football. The Cheer leading in which we puff ourselves up and degrade whoever we are playing against is even more of a game than the game it is occurring for. So maybe the question is, why do we compete about everything? Other animals have their own little social structures, some are pretty awful, and they are all aimed at staying in the gene pool. That is truly the survival of the fittest's goal. But what is our goal? As humans? As big brained, highly adaptable humans? Have we become so focused on winning some unknown thing that we are incapable of playing well with others? Or do we have a ruling class that has gone so far off track that they no longer understand their place in the world. If the last is true, how do we get them back to reality before they get us out of their reality? While it might be funny to see them when there is no one to abuse, to wait on them, to labor making their material goods and food and to act as their servants, it would mean that 98% of the population was gone and no one would be there to appreciate the irony.
We really are all in it together. We need to pay attention and not give away our own little bits of power and influence. We need to shop in places that benefit the community, not in cheap mega-giants that make the greedy richer. We need to not just talk about the environment but actually do things that decrease our negative effect on it. We need to teach our children why to do the right thing, not just tell them what to do. We need to participate in our own governance while we still have a chance to do so. We need to always try to find the similarities between ourselves and "those people," where "those people" are the ones we have stereotyped in a negative way. We all have something in common with every other person we meet or see or hear about. Maybe it is sharing the same number of chromosomes, or the same sex, or age, or place of residence or employment. Maybe its that we both hate Valentine's Day or love hamburgers. Reality is there are many things we likely share based on nothing more than the fact that all life shares certain things in common: The desire to see our children survive and prosper, the basic needs for food, shelter, safety; the desire for justice and equal treatment under the law. And we can get there. We need to keep working to get there. We need to value the right things in life, they things that matter, not just the score-keeping crap created to make us say "I'm better--I win". Reality is, dying with the most toys is still dead and even if you bought your name onto a bunch of hospital wings and public meeting places, the people impressed didn't know you, they didn't know what you did to get so much you could give away more than most people make in a lifetime of work, they didn't know if they would enjoy a conversation with you, they just know you bought your way into posterity until the next rich person donates enough to have the same place named after them. If you want to leave a legacy, raise you children to be good people, loving, peaceful, sharing, honest, people that know the fallacy of the hierarchies we have created socially. Our power, all of our power is in our ability to make the world a better place for the human race and all the species we share it with.
We need to be good to each other.
We need to do good.
We need to change the yardstick we use to measure success.
