I'll be the very first to admit that I'm a bit of an idealist. I've always had a strong sense of the importance of justice and empathy. I defined myself and my life based on the value I placed upon these concepts and I expected the world to do the same.
Whenever I was made aware of something horrific I was filled with a sense of outrage. How could we let this happen? How could we deviate so far from the norm?
And then I realized this weekend, just this weekend (and I want to say here, although it might not reflect well, that I'm 29 years old), that there is no sort of "good" norm that we're deviating from. That actually a world of justice and equality is completely abnormal.
I don't want to sound like a kid here, but this thought, this revelation, well, it kind of stopped me dead. It sort of struck through me with a force I'm still reeling from.
And it got me thinking about the values that are instilled in us, about the morals we are raised with, and about how these affect us as people and as a society. Raising children to believe that they are unique, perfect snowflakes unlike any other person before or after them is wrong. It creates selfish people with an exaggerated sense of their own worth (please pardon my grammatically incorrect [or at least grammatically awkward] gender neutrality here). Selfish people who have an exaggerated sense of their own self worth do not good neighbors make. Try asking to borrow a cup of sugar; they won't answer the door.
More than that, raising children this way is alienating. It forces divides between and among us at a time when we should be recognizing our commonalities. How else can we face the challenges created for us, by us? How can we deal with a swirling trash vortex twice the size of Texas, global warming, war crimes, starvation, and poverty (just to name a minute amount of the daunting issues which we now find ourselves confronted with) with this individualistic, cowboy, Manifest Destiny perspective?
We can't, that's the thing. Our world today has become so small and its problems so big that we cannot afford to perpetuate the myth of the perfect snowflake.
Anyway, apparently my epiphany is that life is not fair, there are many people in the world who work to make others suffer, and it is difficult to call attention to this because these are things that are painful. These are things which are better tolerated with ignorance.
But that ignorance, although soothing, is dangerous. That cliche, ignorance is bliss, is correct in one sense, because yeah, it's easier not to know where chicken sandwiches come from and it's easier not to know how many people die daily from preventable diseases and how could we live with ourselves, for example, if we truly understood the human suffering behind statistics?
This kind of ignorance numbs us to other people's suffering; we don't care because it's too difficult to be cognizant. It's simply too hard to know. And yet, through our ignorance, selfishness, graspingness, and self entitlement, we create (or at the very least tolerate) more suffering, and more than that, we are in a major sense responsible.
Because although we act like we don't know, we know. It's like how people say they don't want to know what's in their hot dogs. Why not? Why is it okay to turn away?
It's okay because each snowflake values itself so highly that it becomes blind to the vulnerabilities of everything and everyone else. How else can we make sense of our ability to ignore reality, or worse, our sheer lack of empathy in the face of human suffering?
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