I like to think I'm still fairly young at 22 years old. I still have a lot of learning to do about this wide world we all share, after all. So this will be the first of (probably) a few entries where i reflect on what I've learned about people and how it relates to my own lived experience and the readings I've done from others. This one in particular is a summation of 22 years of experiences and knowledge, so it will be longer than I expect any subsequent ones to be. When this entry is finish, I expect that I will be putting contents right around here for ease of access. I'm building this entry as I go and I'm still not entirely sure how to organize all these thoughts.
Of course, as a child, I largely soaked up the demonstrated beliefs of the people around me. These are, of course, the beliefs of those im Middle O' Nowhere, Nebraska, so uh, bear with me here as I explain my early beliefs and how they changed rather quickly in my youth.
the most striking of these beliefs was racial prejudice. I grew up in an area that, according to Wikipedia, was around 95% White in the decades I lived there. While I would come to understand that my immediate family were not racist, the area I grew up in implied to a 7 year old me that sorting people by color was more or less okay, as if they were objects that could be arranged by any criteria I could think of. I was fortunate, then, to have this unconscious belief challenged rather quickly. See, my parents aren't exactly "wealthy". How we managed to keep our family home after 2008 probably speaks more to how undesirable the area we lived in was more than anything, but we did have that house. My dad was military, and as such, my mom basically functioned as a single mom with child support money while he was deployed. She couldn't afford to keep us in daycare after the place we had gone to raised their rates. Luckily, my mom had an idea that would be a huge help.
See, my mom had decided to back to college part-time, hoping to achieve something better in life. There, she had made friends with someone (who I will refer to using gender-neutral terms, because they transitioned at a later point and I don't want to cause confusion by suddenly switching pronouns randomly) who was stuck in an abusive relationship because they didn't have the money to move out on their own. So, my mom offered them a deal: they could stay at our house in exchange for taking care of my brother and I, at least until they finished their schooling. Now, this was a 6 foot 1 inch, probably around 300 pound person with what I, as a kid, described as "skin the color of peanut butter" named Sam. I had known people with darker skin, but I only saw any of them on a rare occasion.
The week before Sam moved in, my mom invited them to a family dinner to introduce them to my brother and me. The introduction went... poorly. First, because of the abusive relationship, Sam was basically starving and as such ate a lot very quickly. Being kids, we didn't know or consider the context behind this and only saw an overweight person eating far more than anyone else at the table. It did not help that the house was well over 100 years old and creaked loudly with her every step.
At the end of the meal, my mom told us that Sam would be living in the house, and asked us if he had any problems. My little brother, about 4 years old at the time, said he was worried that they would "fall through the floor". This upset both of the adults, but not nearly as much as what I was about to say. This moment has been burned into my memory forever and has since become a cornerstone of how I try to act int the world.
I told them that my problem was that Sam was "A different color". To this, Sam did not react with an upset expression or anger, as I had thought might happen in my childish brain. Instead, they began to cry. My mom ordered us off to our rooms, but I had seen enough to understand and regret what I had done. I didn't fully comprehend what racism was, but I knew that I had hurt them. At that age, that was really all I needed, I suppose. To know and understand that people who look different from me are, in fact, still people. Although, the following 10 years where Sam was a part of my life in a pretty big way (I have affectionately called them my "third parent" before) was certainly a big help in growing up to be as empathatic and anti-racist as I can.
I'm gonna be honest, it's entirely possible I just made that word up, so I'm going to explain it. It's a uniquely childish aspect of thought wherein you believe that the way you have it must in some way be the way everyone has it. Ironically, I think most people would have experienced this as children, though, on the internet, it seems that some have carried that into adulthood and, to an extent, their political careers. Generally, it's an unspoken expectation that you grow out of it at some point, and failure to do so will lead to you appearing to be a manchild at best, actively harmful nuisance at worst.
For many people, myself included, the moment you leave this mentality is when you learn class disparity. You may not think there are all that many rich people in rural Nebraska of all places, but I found out just how wealthy many of my classmates seemed to be around the time I started driving. Now, I started driving to school and back at 14, because of the whole "living in the middle of nowhere" thing, alongside a good chunk of my classmates. So, my parents and grandparents put their heads and resources together to find me a suitable first car. The result was a 2002 Ford Focus with over 150k miles on the odometer and a heap of other issues. The belt squeaked when it rained, and the rear passenger window was held up with tape, and I later had to keep a roll or two of tape in my backseat just in case something happened to the old tape, the radio would come out of the dash if I braked too hard, and it didn't work anyway. But hey, the AC worked!
So when I squeaked my way to school for the first time, I expected to see the others I had taken Driver's Ed with in a similar situation to me. That is... not what I saw. Instead I saw 3 or 4 farmer kids with like-new Pickup trucks, one kid with an honest-to-God muscle car, and one guy with a beat up S10. Thankfully, I wasn't really close enough to most of my classmates to really be bullied for it, but man was that a wake up.
This might be a problem that was manufactured by the media I consumed as a kid, compounded by the way the human brain and autism work. Basically, I really sorting things by various criteria. As a kid, I did this with basically everything (See "racism" section above for why that was a bad thing). Other early people-based examples are the way I used to pour over Meyers-Briggs results, or Zodiac compatibilities and astrological signs. This is a very simplistic way of viewing the world, and has obviously harmful tendencies that can accompany it. There have been many ar argument about if this tendency is the nature of humanity, or if it's a product of living in complex society of what. For my money, it seems like something that was useful for early humans to survive. Being able to sort things into categories like "edible" or "poison" definitely sounds helpful.
I left my parent's house at 18 years old to off to college. Since then, I have continued to learn, and connect ideas together into a more varied worldview which still holds to what I hope for in my heart for the world, but more on that later. For now, this section is about updated forms of my thoughts on the world and people as of the time of writing. If there is a more up-to-date contemplation, that will be linked at the bottom of the page.
Okay, that might be a bit of a bait-esque header, but let me cook here, I promise I have something to say. This relates to the previous "Labels" section. While those labels I was obsessed with those years ago are more or less meaningless, there are labels that people carry with them that do have a lot of meaning. These are often labels that relate to communities and lifestyles, and there's a problem I've noticed with these labels. When the needs or expressions of communities change, rifts tend to form, and new labels are made. Sometimes, these rifts and additional labels become so granular that a lot fo the labels lose meaning, especially to anyone not intimately familiar with the subjects at hand.
The first example I'll give is the one I'm most familiar with and probably the most widely understandable. I grew up in a Lutheran church, which was the first form of church to split from the Catholics during the Protestant Reformation. This change in label comes from a stated change in values and religious emphasis. Where Catholicism made God and his orders out to be a very formal process where God himself is layers upon layers separated from the sons of man, and have the saints there as a sort of intermediary, Lutheran belief centers a much more personal relationship with God through prayer and communion. There were also some more practical differences, like architecture of churches, tithes (namely that Lutherans don't have them), the role of money, and the structure of Governance (Lutherans are, to my knowledge, much less centralized).
But the reformation wasn't a singular unified thing. It also brought about groups like the Baptists, who focus on, get this, baptism, or the Pentacostals who... I don't have the energy to explain them. Now, this might be an American thing, but a lot of protestant groups were further splintered due to a few political things that happened over here. So then we got things like Southern Baptists. Then there's Mormons, who... I think are technically a form of Christianity, but also... not? And that's where you start to see the labels break down, because the boxes have ceased to make sense to a casual observer and really only work to communicate within very small groups of people. That's how "non-denominational" churches ended up becoming so widespread.
The second example I have to give is very different from the first. The LGBTQ+ communities have had a lot of troubles internally. Part of it is because it is such a large banner, part of it is because of outside and inside groups forcibly attempting to drive wedges and cut down the community (possibly because the idea of "solidarity" is lost on younger generations of Americans at times). And this isn't a recent thing, this spans incredibly far back. A lot of the modern conflict extends from Lesbian feminism, where an intersectional moment between women who were, effectively, unable to exist in society as their own people, Homosexual women, and African-American women resulted in a full movement. In that environment, "Lesbian" became a political identity that became emphasized. They held parades and protests, all sorts of events. In this group, many older lesbians were reviled, because they weren't politically active, trying instead to just fly under the radar as they had in the past. The two groups blamed each other for poor conditions, and all that doesn't even touch what happened later when other Queer folks also tried to intersect with this movement, as they were denied in a movement that revered Lesbians as attempting to remove men from their lives entirely. Again the labels here were getting in the way of unity and intersectionality.
There is a more recent example where labels might be seen as "getting in the way" and as "getting too granular", but also... some of what I'm about to say might just be that I'm already "old" and language use is passing me by. Around about 2018 I wanna say, I came accross the concept of "neo-pronouns" and "xenogenders". I admit, they confused the hell outta me, but think I understand enough to try to summarize it. Neo-pronouns are basically new ways of referring to non-binary, but in a self-specified way. Almost everyone I've seen use these has been fairly young (read: younger than me), but you won't catch me in some boomer-style meme saying that they'll all flip out if you use the wrong pronouns, because they don't under most circumstances. They don't like their choice being belittled, but that's just how people react to that sort of thing. Xenogender is a VERY avant-garde idea of gender at all. Most descriptions I can find of the concept use something along the lines of "Gender beyond human comprehension", and when that's the thesis statement, you have to expect confusion and, on some level, rejection. I thought it was entirely a meme at first, when I saw it on Twitter, with someone making a sort of "starter kit" I guess? For "Windows 95 Gender" or something similarly old tech-themed. I fully thought it was a bit and just moved on. Then I kept seeing thing that were similar. They were all based around aesthetics or animals. When I looked closer, I saw that they were, almost entirely, 14-16 year olds whose bios also mentioned that they were neurodivergent. At that point, I think I came to feel that these kids had a diferent understanding of "gender" that I couldn't even comprehend. It seemed to me that they had conflated the general ideas of gender, which are, in the States at least, a combination of social roles, expected appearances, and a few other fringe concepts, with... personality and aesthetics. To me, the whole thing seemed short-sighted. Like, do you really think you'll be "(＾་།＾)gender" in your 30s?
I think, maybe in time, the concept of Xenogender might be discussed more thoroughly in a post-gender-focused society that may one day exist. But at the very least, to a world where Bisexual Versus Pansexual is a debate every year, it serves to create confusion. Add onto that the pre-existing jokes about genders by right-wing groups, and there is a fair bit of anger that gets directed at, usually, children expressing themselves, which is unfair.
This bit is spurred by something I saw recently while Browsing Neocities. I found a personal site with a diary. I decided to read through a few entries, and it seemed that this person was hell-bent on claiming to be a bad person, thought they just called themselvess "a bitch". A number of entries seemed to insist that they hated doing nice things for people, they hated being around people at all, and that no matte what they try, they get a "sick feeling" when they "have to be kind to people".
And yet, they continue to act kind towards others in their life? That seems strange to me. It's not like the world will turn away if you're rude, I work in customer service, I know that's not how it works. I don't really know this person, obviously, but it's something to think on.
Someone I DO know, however, is my little brother. Since I left for college and started living an adult life, I really only check in with him on occasion. He keeps himself exceedingly busy, so there's never really much time for us to talk, but what I have learned is just a little bit of my brother's worldview. In short, he views human community as transactional. He's had relationship troubles that, while he won't tell me, I suspect stem from this view of others. He always talks about what people by skill level and skill set and very seldom anything else. When he talks about people he wants to be in a relationship with, the factors are generally things like convenience and physical attraction. In my eyes, I view his world as incredibly selfish. There's no love in his world, no charity or random acts of kindness. There's no solidarity because what does that gain you?
When I expressed this to him, he rejected me, acting as though I am somehow sheltered. There were things hidden from me about my brother growing up, but I know them now and I have broadened my horizons considerably, so to be rebuffed by him stung. In this same conversation he insisted that the reason he can't make many friends at college is that he is a bad person. Now, while his active behavior that I've witnessed my whole life prevented me from denying that, I did ask him why didn't change his ways, and he said he didn't want to. For now, my confusion has only grown, because he mourns his feelings of isolation, but rejects every semblance of community that comes his way. He hates the other people who play the same instrument he does, he said he was rebuked by the queer community on campus for "not being gay enough" (possibly related to the above section), he's afraid of going to the gym when other people are there, and he's just... generally kinda hostile toward others in what I've witnessed. This isn't to say he doesn't have friend, but the only friends of his I've met appear to share his prickly attitude and cynical outlook.
In both of these people's cases, they claimed that their "true self" is that outward hostility and isolating tendencies. While I've come to accept that this may be the way that come naturally to them now, I don't believe it is their "nature". I believe they were in an environment where this behavior pattern was advantageous and thus became their personality, which remained even as their situation changed, and hence they mourn that they "cannot" change, because they believe they are no longer flexible enough to become what their new environment needs. So they settle for calling themselves "bad" people or other such self-degrading labels. Now, I've met some truly awful people, and most of them only use poor terms to describe themselves while crying crocodile tears. I've seen my brother as he's grown up, and there's a beating heart as his center that he hates to admit to, and I've seen how he refuses to use others for his own ends, despite his own claims to the contrary. However, I do know that he was always characterized as a "devil" being the youngest of 4 kids, and he learned that he could get a lot to go his way by simply pressing the issue and being annoying, which he often did on my behalf as we were growing up.
Despite everything, I believe people are generally good. Not perfect, mind you, and there are definitely people who are bad, but these are complicated things, and despite all our intelligence, humans are not as smart as we think we are. We tend to resist change, good or bad, which often leads us to making choices that can hurt others. In this way, Empathy is both a passive response to an immediate situation, and an active choice when removed from the situation. It has become easy to remove yourself from the world immediately around you and act with cruelty without feeling you have done so.
People with something to protect or hold onto may let go of concerns with morality, justifying their actions through keeping that which they believe to already be good in an unchanging state. This is generally the framework I believe conservatives act within. I believe this framework to be flawed and generally harmful, as this allows you to ignore the problems that existed in the past, claiming it must've been good for everyone when it was good for you (See "universalism" above) or that the bad things weren't as bad then, no matter what the data might say.
Humans are a traumatized people. We've inflicted trauma and received it our whole lives, and it can form us into people we hate if we let it. A world where the default state of an adult human is untraumatized is unlikely to ever occur, but making a kinder world is a noble goal of any human. Though each human has limited range of influence, the ability to connect and share ideas at instant speed has been the greatest achievement of humanity, though we have often been fools to let it divide us over incredibly silly things.