Why can’t we all just get along?
When I was in college, I naively thought that labels, or words used to describe groups of people, were bad. I thought this because I saw labels as dividers, impassable yet invisible walls between people who should be communicating and working together yet can’t because of their labels. I thought that identifying as woman or white or liberal or red or vegetarian or poor or literary or creative meant that I was something and you were not. Therefore, me and us against you and them.
Later on, I see that these identification labels are important to people, including myself, because we need them in some way. We need to feel part of something. We need words, no matter how feeble they are, to make sense of me and you and what any of this is. We need to connect to one another, to feel like there is a common experience, that there is something greater than just me. If these labels existed simply as a way to connect to a larger community, then hurrah, go labels. But more frequently, they become competitive walls that seem too thick to break down, even though we created them ourselves.
I often think about the differences between people and how we do and don’t identify with one another. I come from a religious and traditional community in Kentucky, a huge family full of warm hearts and delicious, home-cooked meals. I went to college in Boston then moved on to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for five years. I’ve worked as a nanny, tutor and teacher for thirteen years now. These experiences have enabled me to understand multiple viewpoints, from Republican to Democrat to Tea Partyist to Occupyist; from devout Baptist to Jewish atheist; from the uneducated yet incredibly experienced to the overly educated yet still clueless; from poor, drug addicts in Commuter Town, Nowhere to uber rich families in the Upper East Side. There’s still a wide range of experiences across this country that I have not seen. But I fully believe that if I try to understand what other people live like, even if I can never actually know, if I strive to put myself in their place, to think and feel what they might think and feel, if I welcome the fact that they have different ideas and beliefs than I do, if I see that my experience is not the only one, then I have succeeded in something. No, I don’t understand what your life is like. But the importance is in trying.
Too many people consciously decide not to try. They choose to separate themselves, to pit “us” against “them,” to identify as something you are not, when really, we all need to figure out how to suck it up and get along. Like it or not, Middle America, the South, the East and West Coasts, and even Alaska and Hawaii are all a part of this country. Yes, we disagree. Yes, we have different needs. No, we should not continually divide ourselves and work against each other. We can identify as different people with different needs, ideas and beliefs, but we still have to work together as Americans. This obviously means compromising. And yes, compromising is hard.
I hear a lot of young people around me say that we need a real change, they don’t want to work from within the current system, they don’t want to cooperate with the rich, old bastards who run our country. I get these sentiments. But the reality is, the rich, old bastards live here, too. And all the people who voted for them. It pisses me off every time I read a self-centered comment on Gothamist about how the “uneducated people from Middle America” are fucking shit up for us all. You know what? They say the same thing about you damn Yankees. And as long as we continue this dividing and name-calling, nothing’s going to change.
My rant, which I’ve cycled through many a time and in many a variation, kicked off tonight on my bike ride home when I stopped to let a group of people cross the street. Despite the fact I stopped and smiled at them, one of the women said, “So many bikers in this city just don’t care about you, they’ll run you over.” I encounter these sentiments on a regular basis between pedestrians, bikers and drivers in this city, from casual comments to outbursts of extreme anger. While I pedal along, I think, How do we not understand that these roads would run smoothly for all of us if we just worked together?
I bring biking up because it’s a very literal and physical example of my ideas. It’s important to know who you are (in this case, a pedestrian, biker or driver). It’s also important to work together (or else someone will get run over). If you bitch and whine to your label group about the other group, anger will breed and people will no longer work together. Thus, people will get hurt. However, if you make an effort to understand the other group, then people will continue to work together and things will run more smoothly. Of course there will always be accidents but even those would be easier to manage if we’re all trying to see things from one another’s perspectives.
Am I too idealistic? Perhaps it’s impossible for people to let go of their specificity, to loosen their grip on their own ideas and actually compromise. But I honestly believe that if this could happen, even on a small scale, we’d see a major change in this country. We’ve let go of our sense of community when really a community is what we need the most. We seek false communities, or granfalloons as Kurt Vonnegut might say, to fulfill the very basic human need for connection. But then we turn these false communities into ways to compete with and feel better than one another. I think we’d be shocked by the result of turning this competition into cooperation. But the real question is, are we strong enough to do that? Can we actually listen to one another, can we honestly try to understand one other, can we see past our own minds and bodies enough to understand that my way is not the way?
I sincerely hope I’m able to teach my children how to work well with other people. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter how right or wrong or strong-willed or determined or important you are if you are not capable of this simple but difficult skill. You can force people to do things with your money, power, strength or label, but if you can actually empathize, or try to empathize, and ultimately compromise with other people, then the possibilities are endless.
Bird photo taken from PoorlyDressed. Planet of the Apes image taken from SodaHead. Zebra/lion photo taken from lysgbtd.
