racism

Hopefully, I won’t write anything with political overtones from now on. That is the problem with politically charged subjects- the overtones. You can’t say one thing you do mean without people hearing a dozen things you don’t. Don’t believe in global warming? Well, you must hate women. Think George Bush’s paintings are cute? You probably think gay people are going to hell. James was recently called a “disgusting racist” because he doesn’t like the extremely white senator Elizabeth Warren. Politics is like a distortion pedal; simple ideas get turned into horrendous cacophonies of meanings.

For example, one opinion I hold but would never share, based on what people might deduce, is my feelings about the dreaded “n” word. It makes me shiver to think of people being fined $20,000 (even black people!) for saying one of the most popular words in pop music. How does treating a word like a monster help the human race? I have heard people say that this one word must remain taboo until the end of time, that it’s horrible connotations can never be erased. But I don’t think that is nature of words. It is their nature to forget, to shed the nastiest of associations with ease. Words are like clouds, shifting and changing, they never stay the same. See the cloud that looks like Hitler? Give it a moment and it will turn into your mother. Likewise, let a word blow around and its meanings will transform.

But I understand when people don’t want the tragedies of the past to be forgotten. I’m not a “let bygones be bygones” sort of person myself. I just don’t think that words should be turned into memorials- that is what stones are for. They record the past and honor it, long after humans have tired of remembering. I would suggest building as many statues and monuments as it takes to honor the suffering caused by racism and make people feel balanced again. But words are for change and fresh beginnings. They should always fly free.

That is why I also believe in free music, free books, free on-line education. I think it would be magical for every last piece of content on the internet to be completely free of charge. The greatest library ever created! Of course, I’m now using a different meaning of the word free, but really, is a heavy price tag all that different from a heavy chain? Is the expense of education really that different from a fence that keeps the “lower” classes out? Does it actually behoove the human race to put a price on goods which can be infinitely multiplied at no cost to the creator?

People are always worrying about the impact free content has on writers and musicians, but before thinking of them, I’d rather think about all the people in the world who have barely enough money to fulfill their material needs. Why should they have to choose between new music and a new sweater when they could just as easily have both? Free content could enrich the world both immaterially and materially. Which would be a great thing, because, financially, life is strained enough. We have to pay just to have place on this earth where it’s legal to stand. Money for taxes or you’ll go to jail. Money for food, money for water. How refreshing that we can still drink our fill of air for free! How nice would it be if music and literature were just like air, there for the taking, no strings attached? I’ve always thought that the emotional health of a society is closely linked to how much free stuff it has to offer. Not the intimidating “free” services of governments and charities, but truly free things, which are shared just for the joy of sharing.

But what about the musicians and writers themselves? Don’t they deserve to be paid for their efforts? I guess so. Still, I wonder… what would happen if every musician knew, up front, that they would never see a penny from their efforts? Would this be bad ? Or good? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be the death of music. People don’t expect to make money from sex, and yet they keep going. Even sex addicts manage to find other ways of supporting themselves.

Sometimes I wonder how compatible art is with capitalism in the first place. Capitalist art is profitable, popular, pleasing. Whatever good or bad appetites exist in society, capitalist art will be there to satisfy them. Whatever values and ideals we share, capitalist art will be there to capitalize on them. I suppose American Idol-type shows are a good example of capitalist art with a little democracy throw in. Surely a vote is a good way to determine what has value. It worked for Jesus, right?

I think of art as energy, which- like Jesus- comes to us from a different world. A subtle, ethereal impulse that will one day sink down into the heavier aspects of our culture to change the way we think and dress, the food we eat, the wars we wage. But in the beginning, it’s just a little picture, a story, a song. In essence, art is a new way of looking at things. New perceptions which gradually lead to new possibilities. Before the airplane comes the fanciful dream of flying.

But is it reasonable to expect something so strange and delicate to fend for itself on the streets, to fistfight its way to victory on the free market? Should art have to win the approval of the crowd or else, like Jesus, be crowned in shame? Should art even have to bear the burden of supporting it’s creator?

Many of our culture’s great artists did not support themselves, financially, with their work. Emily Dickinson was supported by her parents, Van Gogh by his brother. Thoreau worked at a pencil factory, and Henri Rousseau at a toll booth. William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Artists can always make money in other ways, or else be supported by others. Why not reinvigorate the ancient ideal of patron, for example?

Still, if artists DO want to make a living from art there are zillions of ways to do it without charging the listener. I once read a book about people making a very expensive expedition across Antarctica who paid for it by removing little chunks of their butt meat along the way and selling them to scientists who were studying the effects of extreme cold on muscle mass. Painful, but still, a win-win situation. Or maybe artists could be sponsored by corporations, the way athletes are.

But to be realistic, whatever the future holds, it can’t be much worse than the current situation. Out of the many musicians I have met, I can’t think of one who makes their living from selling CDs/MP3s. Most of them lose more money than they make. Meanwhile, they are still gearing their work to appeal to the very market which will never support them, losing both money and integrity in one fell swoop. Adding insult to injury, they are made to feel that their lack of financial success reflects the worthlessness of what they are creating. If only they had as much to offer as Bono, they would be living in a castle as well. So, if art was no longer expected to make money, perhaps they would be no richer than before, but at least they wouldn’t have to live with the shame of being a failed human being. They could seek new, internal forms of validation. This would lead to more meaningful art.

Just as capitalism motivates us to make money, it can also discourage us from pursuing other sorts of goals. But we shouldn’t let this happen, because a society in which every person’s goal is to make money will be a very poor society, spiritually and emotionally. I think we should have all sorts of people working for free- not just musicians, but also scientists, do-gooders, inventors, and more. We need inputs uninfluenced by the market to create a vibrant amount of diversity. In the end, of course, this could only work if the people who do make money wanted to use some of it to freely support others. But I think people would enjoy this. After all, who would slave over a roast turkey if they had to eat it all by themselves?

Although I tend to think of myself as a liberal person, in recent years the ideas and behaviors that pass as liberal have become more and more disturbing to me. Ideally, I think, to be liberal would mean to be open to a wide range of ideas and possibilities, and to allow people to think and behave differently without punishment or marginalization. But recently, liberalness seems to have become about forcing everyone to have the same, seemingly enlightened, opinions. Opinions which are supposedly tolerant and non-judgmental. Racism, sexism, homophobia, islamaphobia, antisemitism, transphobia… labels like birther and climate-change denier… all these concepts are used like battering rams to force every mind into compliance with the right, the good way of thinking. And I don’t like it. Although I can relate.

The first time Obama ran for president, I didn’t vote because none of the candidates supported gay marriage. I remember Hillary saying she coudn’t condone it due to her deep spirituality (although, miraculously, just like Barack Obama, she has recently had a change of heart). Gay marriage was my number one issue. It felt symbolic to me. Rainbow flags, the very word “gay” with its connotation of happy levity… I naively believed that once gay people were accepted, everyone would be accepted. I would be accepted. People everywhere would drop their masks and let their true selves come forward. Unicorns would walk the streets. So passionate was I about gay rights, I told James I couldn’t marry him unless he would dance in a gay parade. Something which, as a Jehovah’s Witness, he wasn’t keen to do.

James and I would have our worst fights about politically charged issues, like abortion. It enraged him that women would kill innocent babies just so they could continue their debased, sex in the city lifestyle, and I would freak out about all the innocent preteen girls dying as they gave birth to rape-induced babies. He would get choked up as he thought of the poor dad whose first child was killed in the womb without him having any say in the matter; I thought James was being disingenuous to call a single celled organism a child, and if he really was that sensitive then he should be a vegetarian.

Plus, we would argue about black people. Race was a sensitive subject for me. In my mind, black people had become symbolic of my own vulnerable self, of every time I had been abused or treated unfairly. It was easy for black people to assume a symbolic role in my mind, since, to a large extent, I didn’t really know any. Growing up, the black people I knew were mostly housekeepers or waiters at the country club, casting a benevolent and helpful aura around them in my imagination, as though they were a little closer to the angels. Whereas James grew up in a mixed-race world where blacks and whites married, fought, and interacted on equal footing. Which gave him a different view of things like affirmative action. I thought of it in an abstract sense- trying to help a race heal from historical oppression. James thought of it in a more concrete sense- his next door neighbor getting an unfair advantage because of his skin-tone. He didn’t see why he should have to be weirdly sensitive to the black guy sitting next to him in the kingdom hall, stabbing him with a ballpoint pen.

But I really hated fighting with James. Eventually, I decided I would have to stretch my brain out, until I could see things from his point of view. And when I did, I could see that his ideas were valid- he was just reaching different conclusions because he was viewing things from a different place. When I looked at life through his lens, suddenly his ideas and feelings- once reprehensible to me- made sense. Slowly, it dawned on me that my strong feelings weren’t really about gays, black people, or feminism (another point of contention)- these issues had just become symbols for my own wants and needs, my own hurts and pains. And my anger about these issues was really displaced anger, from things that happened to me that I didn’t like. To the extent that I could detach my brain from its baggage and emotional associations, to the extent that I could let it fly free, I saw that, well, maybe a person could want to keep marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution without hating gay people, because, in reality, the only thing that means you hate gay people is actually hating gay people.

And I could also see that it didn’t really matter if any random person did hate gay people, so long as he didn’t set out to hurt them. If he does hate them, odds are that they are a symbol in his mind of something or someone that has caused him pain. We all have these personal symbols, I think, which cause us to irrationally like or dislike certain things and people. Many people who become irate in the face of homophobia make no secret of their aversion to Republican rednecks and religious fanatics. So, considering that it is difficult to even conceive of a person without prejudice, it seems we have no choice but to try and tolerate prejudice in others. If someone did want to wipe out prejudice, their only real option would be to try to wipe out their own prejudices, whatever those might be. However, we tend to view our own prejudices as harmless quirks, not the major threat to society that someone else’s prejudice poses.

There are so many forms of prejudice, so many reasons why people feel superior to others, that it would be impossible to even list them. Wealth, fashion, weight, education, age, career, popularity, sophistication, worldliness, accent, grammar, hair, vehicles, philosophies, diet, opinions, religion, house size, personal size, nationality, lineage, IQ… the list could go on forever. There is no reason to believe that the next Hitler would be an anti-semite. Maybe he would kill people with low IQs or else people with high ones. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that black people will be the slaves of the future- maybe it will poor people, or else rich ones. The devil never does what you expect him to; he is always sneaking up in your blind spot.

The fashionable isms of our day are just tiny drops in an ocean of potential evil. If we could somehow make it impossible for anyone to think a sexist thought, the world would be no better off, because the feelings and bad intentions that fuel one sort of evil can just as easily fuel another, like demons who leap with ease from one body to the next. Sexism is just a form that evil can inhabit- it is not the evil itself.

Which is why I think it is dangerous to go over the world with a microscope, looking only for examples of the evil du jour, while ignoring the bigger picture, which is that we all have crosses to bear and we all need protection from the devil. Or, to bring myself back to the point (sometimes I get carried away when thinking about demons), we are all both the carriers and recipients of prejudice, probably more than we realize. It is when many minds start to merge and congeal around shared ideas, everyone throwing their own emotional baggage into the mix, that I start to get uncomfortable. A large number of people who hate homophobes is more dangerous than the lone skinhead, in my opinion. And when a groupmind starts trying to wipe out the minds that disagree with it, then things can get downright scary. Once everybody shares a prejudice, it doesn’t even seem to be a prejudice anymore- it’s just reality. That must be when the devil really has a field day.

So, I would think, maybe the next time someone says the “n” word, or implies that Jews are good with money, women are bad at math, or gay kisses are gross, maybe, rather than unleash a torrent of righteous anger, we could just try to understand where they are coming from. I don’t think there is any danger in that. Sometimes, when you move your mind to encompass another person’s position, it enables their mind to move in the process.