July 18, 2007

• Them
  

  The last time I wrote here I said, People sometimes get annoyed with me. A dear Kiwi friend commented, Hmmm.  You've mentioned many times about people getting annoyed with you.  I even remember in the early days of xanga SEEING people get annoyed with you.  You don't annoy me.  Weird.  On paper you should. I never bothered asking her what she meant by, On paper you should. I guess I didn't want to know. Wouldn't you know it? Here I am mentioning it again. The truth is I'm not quite as arrogant as I may sound. Not quite as self-absorbed as it may appear. Actually I didn't realize I'd mentioned it so many times. I figured I only mentioned it about one out of every thousand or so times people got annoyed with me. But today I was thinking about it while talking to an acquaintance of twenty-five years. We're about the same age. People about the same age often have a lot in common. A kind of era perspective is shared between them that others of a different era don't understand as readily. He was moaning about genetically altered food and traffic here in the San Diego area. Peter Sellers, in the moving Being There used to say, I like to watch. For me it's more I like to listen. So, I listened. He finally started talking about them. You know who they are. The people who are not like us. He was talking about how limited people are in their awareness of their world. That they think they're like us. They think they're aware. He talked a lot about them and how different they are from us. Because I like to listen I did just that. But then I ruined it all in a moment. Isn't that just like me? Rather than keep my mouth shut and appear to be a fool I have to open it and remove all doubt.

  At this point I hope you're interested in knowing what I opened my mouth to say because I'm going to tell you. I looked at him and said, Bob, (because that's his name) the problem isn't that they think they're like us. The problem is that we think we're not like them. We think we're more aware, more conscious, more alert, more intelligent. But we're not. Actually, that's what they think about themselves. The truth is we're all pretty much alike on this planet. Oh, there are some differences, but they're not important enough to make a big distinction between us and them. Well, Bob got a look on his face. So, I asked him if I'd annoyed him. He said it wasn't exactly annoyed but he hadn't thought about it like that before. Or at least not in a long time. Bob didn't have a lot of resistance to the idea that we were all pretty much the same here. That's unusual in my experience because mostly we're an extremely arrogant species. But if you were standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon looking down at a group of people on the floor of the Canyon, the difference in their height wouldn't amount to a hill of beans from up there. You couldn't really tell if they were young or old, male or female, short or tall, fat or skinny from that vantage point. My point is that we're all so much alike here it's just plain silly to get annoyed with one another because of some extremely minor differences in manifestation. Some folks are light and some are darker. Some boys like boys, some boys like girls and some boys like peaches. Really, there's not a lot about which to get annoyed, upset, angry or deadly. Yet we do. We get downright deadly with one another about these little differences between us and them.

  So, what is it I'm suggesting? That it's okay for people to molest children or peaches? Nope. What I'm suggesting is that we don't have to get so upset about it. It's not going to change anything. In fact, the historical evidence suggests it only makes matters worse. Aberrant behavior has been with us for a very long time and will likely be with us for many years to come. There are some things we can do about it and then there's all the rest. Most of it falls into the all the rest category. Perhaps creating the force of understanding within ourselves would help us to do something about it that would actually work. Maybe not. But really, think about it. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if we took a little more time to try to understand each other rather than spend so much time picking out the differences between us and them? Can we not see that when we do that they always come up on the short end of the stick? Has that kind of thinking and the resultant behavior ever led to good things for our species? Of course, there are going to be exceptions, but in general, isn't that kind of habitual, automatic thinking problematic? I'm suggesting that by thinking more about the us and them mindset we might be able to create a bit more understanding in ourselves and thereby give us the opportunity to make a contribution to solving the problem rather than just pointing it out and moaning about it. Sound like too much trouble? Well, it probably is a lot of trouble, but it just might be with the effort.
  

  • 3:08 pm
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