On February 21st 2020, a video of 9 year old boy, Quaden Bales, who was bullied at school to the point of being suicidal went viral. He was one among many humans that are ruthlessly bullied. He has dwarfism. Like many of the 20 million+ viewers, I watched the news story in horror and it got me thinking…about humans, about difference.
The fact is we hate difference. And very limited progress has been made in humanity to accept, let alone embrace, difference. In fact, we have been conditioned to hate our own differences ourselves, leading to a toxic culture of low self-regard, self-love, self-esteem.
“When you judge others, you judge yourself” my sister says. I finally get it. It’s all connected. Our hatred for others for their differences spills over logically into hating ourselves for our differences. And we’re all different in some way or the other, some more obviously than others. So it leads to hate and punishment towards ourselves and towards others. It’s a pretty miserable way to live, when clearly another equilibrium exists where we accept, love and celebrate diversity in all of its forms.
Subtleties
Whilst some forms of bullying over differences are overt and aggressive, there’s also the insidious judgment all of us carry around. I want to write about that because whilst we may not encounter someone beating someone up or shouting at someone every day, we do encounter this type of judgment on an HOURLY basis.
It’s subtle, it’s often unspoken, it’s a reel playing in your mind constantly, but it contributes to the cloud of toxicity that surrounds our global culture. It’s so pervasive, that it spares LITERALLY NO ONE.
I now see it everywhere, but I see it in the place that I have the most access to – my own mind, and now I try to be conscious of it, not judge myself for judging, but just be like “oh look, looks like a bias or judgment”.
In this blog-post, I want to dissect some of the more subtle judgments many of us have participated in, some of them even socially sanctioned judgments.
Judged group #1: Stay-at-home mothers – as a feminist with many feminist friends, it was very popular at times to say things like “Oh, I’d never stay at home”; “I’d get bored”, “I need to be financially independent at all times”. These thoughts are fine and legitimate if they are about YOU and YOUR preferences. They become problematic if they spill over to assuming another woman is bored or being financially naïve or should or should not be staying at home. Because that’s her story, her life, her choice.
Judged group #2: Mothers who spend a lot of time at work and have a family – mothers have a hard time “winning”, because equally I’ve been part of groups that have judged mothers who don’t go home early, who use a full-time nanny, who are online at 10 pm. May be instead of hating on these strong professionals, we should admire how they are able to juggle so much. Her story, her life, her choice.
Judged group #3: Women who don’t want to have children – I was listening to one of my current favorite podcasts “Unf*ck your brain” by Kara Lowentheil and she talks about how she doesn’t want to have children, and her parents want her to have children. And it occurred to me how much society still judges women and men who don’t want to have children as some kind of anomaly or failure. As if reproduction is like a moral duty and the ultimate hallmark of “success”. When in fact, a) someone’s decision is none of your business and b) we have 7 billion people in the world, projected to get to 9 billion, so the sentiment you should have towards people who have discovered meaning in other ways is gratitude. Kara Lowentheil, Oprah Winfrey and many other great women of our times have added so much new thinking and positive energy into the world that it is totally irrelevant whether they have biological children or not. It’s very telling that right now most female envy is still reserved for women with families. I want to see a world where we envy childless women just as much. Envy is the ultimate compliment, after all. And humans are worth more than reproduction.
Judged group #4: People who don’t want a relationship. We keep saying there’s some age when they “should”. No, there isn’t. It’s their choice. I was guilty of this line of judgment myself when I would debrief dates with girlfriends and say things like “I can’t believe he’s 34 and still wants to play the field”. Now I think – It’s totally his choice. The only thing you can fault a guy for is dishonesty, you can’t fault him for having a preference that doesn’t match up with yours.
We need more social acceptance around being single, around being “picky” and around being happy being single. Ironically, the biggest challenge to being happy being single is not the being single part but the constant “So are you dating?” questions you get from everyone around you as if that should be your goal. You could be perfectly happy, but people will constantly insinuate you are not. I resolved to not do this to myself when I was single last year, and now I resolve to try my best not to do this to anyone who is single.
Judged group #5: People with privilege – a hard group to sympathize with perhaps, but this is a blog-post about the subtle pervasiveness of our judgment culture and how it spares NO ONE, so I have to stretch you to think about the rich. Sure, it is miles better to be rich and miserable than to be poor and miserable. I wish we’d get to a Universal Basic Income for the whole world so we could do away with poverty. But the point is people with privilege are people too. They also have setbacks, also have feelings that get hurt. Having been in many institutions with rich and privileged people, I have come to appreciate the fragility of us all. I see how unhelpful and unsympathetic it is when someone has a setback or feels bad about something and all some people can summon up is “But you should be grateful for the food on your table”. Yes, but if you’re saying that, you also didn’t really listen to that person’s problems.
Progress: hard but possible
We all have a hard time accepting difference. We’re all judging based on it. It’s human nature. How could we not assume others are like us, and imagine they may have different desires or logic systems? How could we have the courage to be ourselves against tides that tell us to be something else? What would a world with less judgment and more acceptance look like? What would it sound like? What would a conversation be? What would gossip be? What would identity be?
These are hard questions, because it’s so hard to imagine a world with less judgment. But it’s the direction we must all strive towards for the progress of humanity and for our own sanity. And so that children can stop bullying other children for being different.
Stiletto Muse 