Remembering Our Humanity
ARTWORK BY RICHARD LEE JACKSON | www.WANDERCREATIVE.com
All of us, when we take a moment to remember it, know that the anonymity and distance of the Internet gives us the space to say things we would never say in person.
In addition, we have the ability to spew forth every thought we have - instantly - without the filter or thought we would have if a human were standing in front of us.
It doesn’t matter if we think better of it a moment later and delete it ... The world heard it, and as far as the masses are concerned, it’s who we are.
This moment in our national conversation, where we think there is so much more “evil” than before, is simply a function of our primary interactions happening in the online space.
We have come to equate people’s online, unfiltered, spewed forth in, say, something like a moment they just stubbed their toe, as their fundamental humanity.
As WHO THEY ARE.
And by the way, that moment we just stubbed our toe is a state many of us LIVE in, because our “news” is so carefully constructed to keep us in a constant state of fear and panic.
It MATTERS that the disturbing things we encounter in the online space and in this moment would never be said to someone in person.
THAT is who we are as humans.
It’s our humanity that’s responsible for the fact that while it’s easy to hurl your judgment and outrage at “them,” it’s harder to look Susan Compton in the eyes and call her “pure evil.”
In the words of the fantastic Brené Brown, people are hard to hate up close.
That’s because when I’m standing before you, you can see and feel and know the fullness of my humanity.
That is what’s been lost in the shift of our conversations to online platforms.
We feel and know the fullness of our own humanity, but we experience “them“ as disembodied words.
While we’re not consciously aware of it, we just don’t feel the humanity of the person on the other end of the screen.
Depending on how often you interact with them in real life - without even knowing it - you perceive them to be nothing more than a collection of the words they spewed forth in a moment.
Words, by the way, which were informed by completely inaccurate and manipulative “news” that was designed with the sole purpose of creating fear and controversy for profit ... And let me promise you, neither “side“ has the market cornered on whipping up fear and spreading vicious lies about your neighbors. The disturbing things we see from the far right are matched every bit by assumptions on the left that those disturbing things are shared or supported by everyone who casts a conservative vote.
It is an asinine worldview to imagine that humans neatly fit into two categories, and it is arrogance of the highest order to assume that that vote means to them what it means to you.
Through the efforts of some very savvy marketing over the past few decades, we’ve made a shift from IDEAS being liberal or conservative, to HUMANS being liberal or conservative.
When you pair that with our social media world where we now know that identity about each other before we’ve ever met each other’s humanity, it’s a recipe for exactly what we see today.
Without even being aware, we’ve come to see our neighbors as nothing more than a collection of those ill-informed words plus monumental assumptions with which we’re filling in the rest of the picture.
Assumptions I promise you are 100% wrong, because all you can know is your own experience and what words mean to YOU, which have not a single thing to do with what those words mean to them.
Even as we’ve seen instances of disturbing things shift from online platforms to real life, they were birthed and grew online, in the space where we’ve lost sight of each other’s humanity.
When we meet out on the street, then, I’ve already decided that you’re not a human.
We need to take a step back and look at that.
We need to understand how deeply these disembodied interactions are coloring our beliefs and feelings about each other.
We also need to take a serious look inside ourselves.
Put down the microscope and pick up the mirror, as my friend Miles Adcox so awesomely says.
When we look out into the world and see “them,” people saying and doing things we believe we would NEVER say or do, we have not spent sufficient time with our own hearts and our own pain to come to know the full spectrum of what lives in breathes in us.
That every single one of us could ABSOLUTELY do and say every single one of those disturbing things.
Compassion is born of self-awareness.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it is ONLY born of self-awareness.
When your idea of “compassion” is viciously attacking those you perceive to be harming those you feel compassion for, that is not compassion.
It’s not caring for those you care for.
It’s abandoning them, to go be a vicious and wounding presence in the world.
Compassion is born when we discover that those disturbing things we see in the world come from pain and fear ... Because we have felt them rise from our own pain and fear.
When we discover that those we care for need our kind presence in their pain ... Not our unkind and frightening viciousness against those who hurt us.
We come to know that the world’s “evils“ are wounds to be healed and fears to be allayed, not enemies to be destroyed.
What’s more, in our attempts to deal with them as enemies - fighting and attacking them - we only create more of them.
As we can clearly see.
We need a new paradigm.
And it starts with a simple realization that the screens through which we are experiencing the world are not windows, the “news“ is not the world - nor even news in most cases - and that these platforms through which we are seeing each other are stripping us of our humanity.
I think social media is miraculous.
I truly do.
I would not have begun this work without it, so it completely changed and enriched my life.
As with all tools, however, it’s all in how you use it, and how you think about it.
It’s not inherently evil, nor is the fact that it’s the primary method through with many of us experience the world.
We just have to remember what it is, what it’s not, and stop to ask what we are believing and what is informing it.
What we are consuming and experiencing here is absolutely not our fellow humans.