I’ve been sitting on a thought for weeks now, waiting for the other part of it to click into place–to make the vagaries of my mind into something cohesive. The missing part clicked into place this morning when I started listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new essays–which start with a letter to his son. In that letter he described the rituals of a street fight. In that moment of listening I went back to a moment in another book, Sentinel, by Mark Greaney and thought about the beginning of that half-formed thought. In the Greaney book he talks about parts of Africa as being “lawless” and as he continued to speak of the regions all I could see were the laws, the rituals, the cultural mores put in place that he openly ignored and ascribed to a wild nation. This clicked into place like the lost piece of a puzzle that finally allows you to see the image you are meant to form. I realized then that the idea of lawlessness he and so many write of is really about wrongness. It is about encountering a world and or a system that doesn’t behave in the way you were raised or function in the fashion that media tells you a place should fashion and, as a result, it is hierarchally beneath you. That’s the entirety of it.
We ascribe wrongness and the less than value to what we do not understand and what we feel we cannot have a high status within. If we cannot see ourselves on the top of it, then the thing we are seeing is wrong and automatically less than us, barbaric, and likely needs to be stamped out, policed, and brought to heel. This functional approach has been applied to politics in such a divisive way as to make anyone who is on the other side seem as less than. Democrats are radical leftist hippies or martini sipping separatists with no relation to the real America. Republicans are backwoods idiots who are not smart enough to realize they are being manipulated or bible thumping puritans who secretly are the dirtiest people we know. All of it is self inflation.
I think the pulse of what I am feeling and thinking and writing in this moment is about the other. The other is rarely aspirational. The other is often oppositional and a threat to our way of life. Yet that is not how I was raised. It is not what I see or believe to be the American Dream. To me that dream is to rise to the top, not against any one group but alongside those who are willing to work as hard as I am and do what it takes in order to succeed. The creation of otherness is a short cut–a cheat code to allow you to remain comfortable where you are, or at least accept you inability to move forward (nay, your desire to look backward) as a reality that is to be accepted.
It is a reality that leads you nowhere. It is a circular state that generates nothing but hate.