The parade of man's inhumanity to man continues. A recent victim was a 16 year old student from Chicago, beaten to death by a mob of other teens using lumber, fists and feet. Ironically, this chilling event provides fodder to both sides of the gun control debate. It supports the NRA claim that guns don't kill people; people kill people, but it also validates the gun control position that people tend to fight with whatever weapons are at their disposal and it's therefore exceedingly unwise to maximize the convenience and ease of killing rather than bruising one another. We'll call it a draw and I'll move on to what I really want to talk about. I want to look at why we seem to have so much animosity toward one another. Although the horrifying rate of cold-blooded murder on the meanest streets of our inner cities is lower in the tonier zip codes, it still feels like half of this country despises the other half, and the level of ill will we're harboring must be dialed down for this to be a healthy civilization.
That said, I can't help but wonder how much we actually dislike one another. Yes, the level of disdain that has permeated our discourse is inexcusable, but the silver lining in this mess may be that we hate much more in the abstract and much less in actual human interaction. We fire off much more vitriolic salvos at abstractions of things we don't like than we do at their concrete counterparts. Across the globe throughout history we've seen instances where large groups of people truly hated one another and every day was a bloodbath waiting to happen. Mercifully, this is not our current circumstance. Please don't get me wrong; our sorry state of affairs where civility has been bludgeoned to death has some serious consequences and we need to reverse this course, but there is a critical difference between extremely bad manners and extremely bad blood. I wouldn't want a broken index finger, but as problems go, it can hardly be compared to a broken spine.
The prescription lies in seeing the humanity in ourselves and others. Whether liberal or conservative, black or white, Muslim or Jew, gay or straight, we need to see the value and dignity in all human life. This is not holding hands and singing Kumbaya; this is self-evident common sense we would immediately see if we could get our collective head out of the orifice in which it never belonged in the first place. When we become an angry mob we lose touch with our own humanity and conscience. That's how otherwise civilized people commit savagery like the example cited at the top of this post. When we fail to see the humanity in others we are not only capable of unspeakable atrocities, but we also tend to be cruel in ways we sometimes don't even realize. We humiliate and demean others by, among other things, denying their full rights of citizenship and treating them as less than full-fledged human beings.
It's not hard to rise above this and take the high road; anyone can do it. Look at the example of Dick Cheney. Why would this poster boy for neo-conservatism support gay marriage? Because 40 year old Mary Cheney is not a nameless, faceless lesbian but his beloved daughter and mother of his grandson and mother-to-be of a second baby due next month. She is a woman committed to the love of her life and she has hopes and dreams like any other man's daughter. He wants her to have the same opportunity for happiness and fulfillment that any father would want for his children. For the former V.P. the issue will always have a human face. Sadly, until we can learn this simple lesson, senseless bloodshed will continue because the victims were not perceived as human beings, but as abstractions that fell prey to someone's inner demons.
