This isn’t going to be a political post, but it is inspired by what is going on right now and the political climate in the United States presently. It is probably going to be a very controversial post, because it goes against what is most popular these days among the liberal crowd. The current government and the political environment have been compared to The Hunger Games, to the Holocaust, and other dystopian stories and historical tragedies. I am political, socially, and economically liberal, but this is not going to be a rant about politics, nor is it going to be an opinion piece on the government or politics or anything like that. What I want to talk about instead is the way in which we have become so divided by our politics, and the way in which we, particularly people with political opinions like my own – liberals, talk about “the other side”.
What’s so fascinating to me is that one of the most important and fundamental lessons we learn from The Hunger Games is that when you begin to hate the people who committed the crimes, rather than the crime themselves, then you fall into a dangerous situation in which you become liable to be just as hateful and evil as the very people you are accusing. Yes, I think that the way many of the people in this country are being treated by the current administration and its supporters is absolutely despicable. I think that a lot of their actions and policies are absolutely despicable. But what I do not want to do, what I think we absolutely cannot do, no matter how tempting and easy it would be, is fall into the trap of hating the people who are carrying out such actions. Hatred turns the person into something less than human, and at that point we are have become the very person we view as so terrible.
I have seen and heard so many people, an alarmingly large majority of people, with liberal perspectives say things like “MAGA supporters are evil”, “MAGA supporters have no empathy”, etc. I myself have caught myself thinking such things as well. But the truth is that the people who support Trump and his administration and policies are not evil villains, just like most of the people of the Third Reich were not evil villains. They are not subhuman, and we cannot fall into the trap of thinking of them as creatures completely different than ourselves. To do so would be to do the very thing that we consider so reprehensible of them. These are people who love, who fear, who feel anger and sadness and disappointment and every other human emotion that we all do, and to consider them “other”, or to believe that they are incapable of empathy or otherwise evil, is to do a great disservice both to them and to ourselves. Just because a person supports MAGA/Trump doesn’t mean that they are completely different than a person with liberal viewpoints. Just because they support ICE doesn’t mean that they are villainous.
I’m so incredibly concerned about the dialogue that is popular right now that a person’s politics tells you “everything you need to know about that person” and “whether they are a good or bad person.” For one thing, I’m not entirely convinced that there is such thing as “good” or “bad” people, at least for the vast majority of the human population. We’re all just people, with hopes and fears and dreams and loves and anxieties and everything else that makes us human. But equally importantly, knowing someone’s politics doesn’t mean that you know everything about that person, or that they are so different from you as to be entirely unrelatable. Sure, maybe you don’t want to spend a lot of time with a person who has different political viewpoints than you. It’s absolutely understandable if you choose not to be friends with them or take them for a spouse or romantic partner. And sure, you can learn a lot about someone from their political viewpoints. But to think that you know all there is to know about them, or to consider them to be anything less than a person who deserves compassion and empathy is to make a grave mistake, and a mistake that we will likely end up paying for in the future.
This goes not only for politics, but for any way that we consider someone else to be different. In the end, in every way, we are much more alike than we are different, and no matter what we disagree on, we can find ways in which we can connect and relate. And even if you can’t, that doesn’t mean that the person across from you, the person with views completely opposite yours, the person with views that you consider to be completely reprehensible – it doesn’t mean that they deserve to be treated with any less compassion. That doesn’t mean that reprehensible actions go unpunished (although I’m not fully on board with the idea of “punishment”, either, but that’s a different post), but it does mean that we don’t vilify or dehumanize them.
You can think about it this way: if something a person does or believes makes them in any way “less than”, that puts us all in danger of being treated as “less than,” because none of us are perfect. And maybe you’ll say “yeah, but I’m not as bad as that/them” – but who says? Why do you or anyone else get to decide who is “less than”? Essentially, this is just a long winded way of saying – “judge not lest ye be judged” and “treat your neighbor as you would yourself”. I beg you, I beg you, please do not fall into the trap of ever thinking that someone is less than human because they are different in any way. If we hate racism, if we hate sexism, if we hate discrimination, if we hate all of those things that we claim to, then we cannot become those who hate the people who behave in such ways, otherwise we become those who do the very thing that we supposedly hate.