When you’re in elementary school, you start a club. A spy club, or a ninja club, or a boys club or a treehouse club. And in doing so you create your own little world, something you identify with. You and your select group of friends who are in your club suddenly have something that other people don’t, and for some reason it’s a good feeling. It feels good to tell people that they can’t be in your club. It feels good to talk about how stupid people are who aren’t in your club. It’s feels good to take a young, fragile person who has hopes and fears and insecurities (just like you) and turn them into a caricature - you and your friends call them a dork or a loser and in the process destroy a little piece of their heart…probably in a way very similar to what happened to you when your older brother or sister or friend told you they didn’t want you to hang out with them.
We learn when we’re extremely little that there are people who are ‘in’ and people who are not. We learn that if you’re not in my group you’re probably stupid. In high school we get in fights at the mall or at a party with a group of kids because they go to a different high school than we do - because they committed the travesty of living in different neighborhood we learn to hate them for no apparent reason.
We grow older and hate people because they root for a different basketball team, or because they vote differently than we do, or because their God is different than our God or because their skin tone is lighter or darker or because they speak a different language.
We do it because it feels good to turn people into cartoons. It feels good to feel like you’re better or smarter or prettier or faster than others, and the easiest way to do so is to take these complicated, emotional, talented, fragile people and package them up into a singular idea. Once we turn them into cartoons it’s easy to hate them.
It’s easy to call George Bush an idiot or Bill Clinton evil. It’s easy to call the kid downstairs a punk. It’s easy to call the guy sitting across from us on the subway a drunk. It’s easy to call the beautiful girl on the other side of the bar stupid and easy. It’s easy to wave an American flag and dismiss people’s complaints as ignorant or unpatriotic. It’s easy to shout from a pulpit that the gay guy in the car next to at a traffic light is demon possessed. It’s easy to call your Christian coworker an intolerant sheep with no understanding of the real world.
They’re not part of our club, so there’s something wrong with them.
What’s hard is to rip up the membership card.
What’s hard is to not get into a stupid argument about whether the Raiders or the Broncos are the better team.
What’s hard is to realize that the girl who walked by you on the street with the ‘go to hell’ stare is probably immensely self-conscious because of magazines telling her how she’s supposed to look and talk and interact, that she may have been hurt emotionally or otherwise by a slew of guys who didn’t value her as a person.
What’s hard is to contemplate the unthinkable tragedies that might have happened in the life of a guy that’s reduced him to sitting on a corner without having showered in a week, humiliating himself by having to hold out a three day old paper coffee cup begging you to drop in your spare change.
What’s hard is to have a conversation or read an article about protests in France or wherever and ask yourself whether their protests have some serious merit.
What’s hard is to acknowledge that every serious political candidate you’re seeing on television has lived a pretty extraordinary life, has done a great deal to impact the lives of those around them and holds the ideas they hold (is willing to put themselves on television at our mercy to spread those ideas) because they truly believe that they will help the country in the long run. What’s hard is to be willing to admit that the idea that one party is right about every idea while the other party is hopelessly insipid…is pretty insipid.
What’s hard is to be aware that there are indeed villians in the world, but they are in much shorter supply than we think. The majority of people we treat as villians are fragile, broken, self-conscious people just like us. And the hard thing is to respond to people, with their scars and blemishes and dissenting ideas and misguided actions….and love them.
We should all consider letting more people into our club.
Forget that - we should all consider getting rid of the club.
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