Editorials by Bob

(Note: the bulk of this article was written before yesterday's post.)

I am not a thing. I am a human being. I have thoughts, dreams, desires, opinions, and feelings, and I have as much a right to pursue them as anyone else. I have a desire to be loved and appreciated as a human being, and a right to pursue that love by giving others the same value.

Go back and read that first paragraph. Apply the first-person pronoun to yourself. Say it out loud (unless of course there's someone else nearby and it would embarrass you).

Affirm it, believe it, and don't ever forget it.

To often these days people -- of every culture and society, not just ours -- tend to treat each other as mere things. We might say we regard each other as people, but it seems like there's always a particular group, whether it's everyone else or just those who don't think like us in a certain way, whom we regard as inferior, or as less important than ourselves.

Our "free-sex" subculture is one of the easiest targets for pointing this out, where one's value is judged (at least in large part) by one's appearance, or the size and functionality of one's sexual organs. Yes, there are plenty of people in this group who really do care about how you're doing as a person, but once the clothes come off humans tend to become not much more than masturbation toys. Sometimes our partners are the toys, sometimes it's ourselves -- and those outside the subculture are often no less guilty of the crime, sometimes lumping the whole lot into a single group of sex-starved monsters with no real humanity.

But it happens in our supposedly conservative "core" families too. Husbands and wives, even in a pure-marriage sexual union, can think of what they do as "just sex," reducing their partners to playthings. And our children can become mere objects for our pleasure too -- not just sexual pleasure for incestuous molestation, but just the power trip of "you do what you're told, because I told you." I'm not talking about, "You need to pick up your room," or, "Turn that stereo down or you'll hurt your ears"; I'm talking about, "Your entertainment dream is just a pipe dream, you need to go into the business sector," or (the stupidest I've ever heard) "You go to church or I'll beat the living crap out of you."

I've actually read of at least one parent, and read the first-hand writings of another, claiming that children are, morally and legally, the property of the parent.

Politics is another area where we tend to (for lack of a better word) dehumanify each other and ourselves. Whether on the political left or right, Democrat or Republican (or Libertarian or Green or Reform or Independent or whatever else), there's a sad tendency to stand in judgement of those who disagree, engage in childish name-calling, and generally claim to hold the higher moral ground even while the very act puts us on lower moral ground.

Political tantrums are nothing new. In America, it goes back to our founding days, when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fought bitterly over exactly how powerful the Federal government should be. And we didn't invent it, either, as the proceedings in the English Parliament will demonstrate -- and I personally would put the assassination of Julius Caeser into this category. The entire "class struggle" between "the haves and the have-nots" is built on the same premise that people of a particular type are less important than people of another, whether it's the "haves" looking down on the "have nots" or the "have nots" looking with hostility and resentment on the "haves."

And politics goes to the external as well as internal view. Europeans (whites) are best known for it because the European countries once tried to partition out the world amongst themselves, seeing all other races and cultures as "barbaric," but those other races and cultures have hardly been immune -- look at how the Mongols and Chinese have treated each other over the centuries, or the Japanese over the Koreans, or the Mayans over their various neighbors, just for starters.

The religious front is also infamous for it. The Catholic Church did it during the Crusades and the Inquisition. The atheists in charge of China and Vietnam do it today, to anyone of religious faith. Al Qaeda does it to non-Muslims, especially Christians and Jews.

The political and religious depersonalizers have a simple premise: those who don't believe as they do are heathens, infidels, heretics, and sub-human threats to those of us who are intelligent to know better.

So let's get this straight here. You are not a thing. You are a human being. You have thoughts, dreams, desires, opinions, and feelings, and you have as much a right to pursue them as anyone else. You have a desire to be loved and appreciated as a human being, and a right to pursue that love by giving others the same value.

I happen to be an American, a center-leaning conservative, a Christian, a heterosexual a middle-class white male, a survivor (such as it is) of psychological child abuse, a sufferer of mental illness (with multiple anxiety disorders, OCD and PTSD among them), a married man, an unemployed person, a genius (in the sense of having an IQ of 140), and an aspiring novelist, playwright, composer, and actor.

And not one of those things, nor any specific detail within any of them, should ever eliminate the statements in the first paragraph. And whatever there is about you that's different from me, no part of it changes any of it either. You still have the unalienable right to be treated as a person first and foremost, to be valued simply by right of being human, and of having your hopes and dreams and aspirations valued just because they're yours.

Definitely, I forget these things from time to time. That's only natural; making mistakes is just part of being human. There's a very public example of this right on this blog, barely over a week old. It's not the first time in my life I've screwed up on this, and it probably won't be the last. But I believe in these principles with all my heart.

So do me a favor. Go up to that first paragraph, and replace "I" with "you," and say it aloud, pretending to be saying it directly to me.

Now do yourself a favor. In your imagination, pick the one person you think is the least human -- it might be President Bush, or Michael Moore, or Osama bin Laden, or Pat Robertson, or any of dozens of other well-known people. It could be an abusive parent or ex-spouse. It could be that bully who always gave you a hard time at school, or that obnoxious supervisor at work. Anyone. And imagine yourself saying the transformed paragraph to that person, and meaning it.

And see if it doesn't change your perspective -- or, at the least, make your day seem a little brighter.