It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
or, bemoaning the state of the world
It doesn’t have to be this way. I think it all the time. I think it when I see a person experiencing homelessness on a street corner. I think it when I turn the corner and see a Bentley driving down the street.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
When I hear a friend struggling to pay their rent or mortgage. When someone else struggles with the healthcare system. When the anniversaries of my dad and brother’s suicides roll around.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
When I read another story about someone being arrested and deported. When we refer to people as illegals instead of human beings. When students get arrested for protesting what is very clearly, very loudly, very obviously a genocide.
It’s what I think when I wake up in the morning. It rolls through my mind at every news story, at every hurt I hear about. It’s the last thought before I close my eyes before I go to bed.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way. But it is this way, and what am I going to do about it?
Everyone is so afraid all of the time. That fear reminds me of the horseshoe theory of politics, wherin the far right and far left are closer to each other than we are to the political center. And we are so, so close in our fears.
Our systems of oppression work early and often to indoctrinate us into fear. Capitalism teaches them (us) that everyone is our competition. Colonization teaches them (us) that difference must be squashed, controlled, assimilated. Patriarchy teaches them (us—men, mostly) that fear is a good justification for anger and control. The right wing, then, lives in fear. They see skin color, gender expression, sexuality, age, sex—all of these things are threats. They think those of us who are different are out to destroy them, when in reality, we just want to live.
Then the left? We are afraid because the projection of the right’s fear onto difference is actually what they’re doing to us. They are erasing our history. They are disappearing us in the present. They are laying the foundations to do worse things in the future. They are what they fear, and they’re too scared to see it.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
What is the way out of this fear? The only thing I can think about is how oppression dehumanizes everyone involved—the oppressed and the oppressor. So the only way out is to humanize each other. To see each other as the scared, flawed, fully human people we are. But how do we get people to see us as human first when they’ve been taught to see us as threats? We have to keep treating them like they’re human. We have to recognize their humanity even when all we want to do is celebrate their pain (think #leopardsatemyface). We have to remember to show compassion to these people, because they are living lives of terror that they’ve made up. And isn’t that sad? Isn’t that worthy of pity and compassion? Doesn’t their hate and their fear demonstrate that something is fundamentally hurt and broken with them?
We can be angry—we have every right to be—but we cannot only treat them with the same anger they show us. We have to process it, and then remind ourselves that even in their desire to destroy us, they are still people. We have to rub their faces in our humanity. Make them see us as people. And we can’t do that if we are demonizing them, too.
This isn’t going to be easy, or fun, or even something we have to apply all the time. But it is how we get out of this—how we heal what this country has done to everyone.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Maybe someday, years from now, it won’t be anymore. That’s what I’m holding on to.