We have a habit of making two dimensional categories to describe people. I call these categories “conventions of convenience”. We give each category a name and start separating people into one group or the other. This is the problem. Thinking about people or issues in this way makes the world seem all one way or the other. It tends to heighten the divisiveness in our culture. Below are some examples.
Conservative verses Liberal
If you use the definition of these terms, a minority of the US population is truly conservative and a minority of the population is truly liberal. The majority are a mixture the two categories. For example, I consider myself a social liberal/fiscal conservative. You might say that this makes me an independent voter. The problem is that no one ever calls me an “independent”. My liberal friends call me a conservative and my conservative friends call me a liberal. Both are wrong.
People are a mixed bag of beliefs and values. This is why congress rarely has a confidence rating of more than 25%. Extremists are always pulling the dialog away from the middle where the majority of us live.
Religion verses Religion
Do you believe in god or are you an atheist? Are you Christian or Muslim? Are you Catholic or Protestant? Even though the above conventions of convenience have been the cause of great pain and strife in the world, the majority of people involved do not totally buy in to all the belief and behavior requirements of any of these religious groups. There is a great deal of belief and behavior overlap among these groups that is ignored by a few extremists in order to accentuate the differences.
When left to their own devises, the vast majority of people can get along just fine with persons from other belief groups. The problem comes from situations where extremists begin to control the dialog.
Race verses Race
I heard a story recently where a magistrate was telling an African American defendant that the charge of possession of marijuana would affect his ability to keep his subsidized housing arrangement in the projects. The problem was that the man in question was a middle manager in a large company who owned a $200,000 home in the suburbs. Conversely, I know of a situation where a young white male was told by a magistrate that his possession of marijuana was an embarrassment to his family. The problem was that both his parents were drug users who had been in and out of jail multiple times.
The truth is that we are more alike than we are different. Regardless of race, we all pretty much want the same things out of life. The categories don’t fit the vast majority of us. Only extremists worry about the differences.
How can we cope with a society where we go to such great effort to categorize everyone into polar-opposite categories? We can start by spending more energy looking at how we are similar to each other and less energy looking at our differences. We can also try to move the dialog away from the extremists to the middle.
Let me leave you with this. During World War II, one allied Chaplain observed that both sides of the conflict prayed to the same god for victory. How stupid are we to assume that God, or anyone else, is ever going to reward us for our conventions of convenience?