Shadow Idol: On the problem of the mob not wanting to get involved.

[silveradept]

Many of us, when we talk about the past, want to say "I would never have supported the Nazis, or the racists in the South", or any of those groups for with we see the error of their ways in clear hindsight. The truth of the matter is that many of the people in the past that we condemn with our clear eyes were much more complicated than our narratives tell us. So, let's have a bit of an example. Everyone, put your heads down on your desks and close your eyes. I'll read a few statements. Tell me whether you agree with them by raising your hand.

The United States War in Iraq has been a failure.

The United States War in Afghanistan has been a failure.

Marriage between white and brown people should be outlawed.

(At this point, if there has been someone not following the directions of eyes closed and heads down, their name is invoked instead of a generic.)

Remember to keep your eyes closed. I'll do my best to make sure this is followed, but there's no guarantees that someone isn't looking and I just haven't caught them yet.

Let's continue. Remember, raise your hand if you agree with the statement

Every person deserves the right to marry the partner or partners of their choosing, regardless of their sexes.

Each person deserves to be recognized by the gender they choose, regardless of what their outward presentation looks like.

God intends for women to get married, serve their husbands, and have children to mother.

(By now, I am fairly certain that I would have a smattering of different responses, some who put their hands up, some who left them all down.)

Mm. Fair enough. Put your hands down, open your eyes, and raise your heads.

I can conclude, with reasonable certainty, that some of you would not have been fighting against the racism of the south, would not have been attempting to smuggle Jews out of Germany and other Nazi-controlled territory, and are not the civil rights pioneers that you believe yourselves to be, at this point in your lives.

How so? Because not everyone raised their hands on the civil rights issues questions after the first one (that's a control question, by the way), and not everyone kept their hands down on the women's issues questions.

This is not a reflection of your character, though. The way the questions and responses were phrased, nobody was forced to admit they were against a civil rights issue.

I reminded you a few questions ago that there was the possibility that your classmates were watching you secretly. For some of you, I'll bet you wanted to raise your hand, but if that jerk two seats down was watching you at that particular moment, you know that you wouldn't hear the end of it. And then, of course, there was always the question of whether raising you hand when the teacher was watching, or not raising your hand when the teacher was watching, was worth it. Maybe I would change your grades once I knew you didn't agree with me. That wouldn't happen. If it did, I would be fired, and rightly so.

You might have believed in the statement, but the peer pressure was too much for you to risk it. Peer pressure was there, too - if you were caught hiding Jews, you could be sent to concentration camps or killed. If you were white and seen as a sympathizer to black people, you could be fired from your job, ostracized from your social circle, and shunned from white society. If you were black and someone thought you were being an "uppity n-word", they could get friends to beat you or kill you, and the law wouldn't necessarily prosecute try all that hard to find out who did it. Does this sound familiar?

Standing up for someone else is always a risk. Sometimes it seems like the risk is too great. Some of you will work within the strictures of your social circle to spread tolerance and acceptance. Some of you will speak out against injustice, and be a visible and public presence for the causes you support. Some of you will be on the other side of that issue, with the counter-protesters and the people who believe that it's a "special rights" issue, because God-through-your-pastor said so, because your parents said so, because it's what you believe. If that's what you believe, though, you can advocate for yourselves without creating an environment of fear and hostility and without resorting to violence.

If you can only get your point across by hurting the people saying you're wrong, you've lost the argument. And as you do violence unto others, they stare at you, each asking you a question. It's the same question they ask of all the people who stand by and watch, either because they're paralyzed by peer pressure or because they secretly agree. "Et tu?" "Et tu?" "Et tu?"

When you resort to violence, it's only a matter of time before people look back at you and proudly declare that they wouldn't follow the path that you followed...while ignoring the parallels between their own issues and the issues of the past.

"La plus ca change, la plus le meme chose." Or, as Santayana said, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Will you be repeating the past today?
-----------

This has been a Shadow Idol post, prompt 19: "Et tu, Brutus?"

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Experience seems to be actively rejected lately, and it scares me.

[silveradept]

Actively rejected, and those who have the experience are attacked as not being relevant to the conversation.

[lilacstarprint.livejournal.com]

That was an awfully long way to go to say that the past is easily repeatable because peer pressure is the gear in the wheel that helps it along. Nicely stated, but a long way around to saying it.

[silveradept]

Well, that's the point, but that's not the entire point. It's such a roundabout way because most people don't believe the peer pressure bit unless they experience it for themselves. If they understand it in a more visceral way, then maybe the lesson sinks in.

[lilacstarprint.livejournal.com]

Good point.