Extreme Sporks!

Dear Internauts,

So I was chillin’ in traffic earlier, thinking bout how in certain weather conditions, even driving carefully can be a bit of a thrill ride. Also, I was thinking about my current read, Tarkin by David Luceno, and listening to the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The traffic snailed along till the word extremist popped into my head. 

Assume whatever psychological maladies you may like from all of that association.

Extremists are like celebrities. Whether or not they actually are celebrities by a stricter definition isn’t as important as the paradigm of segmenting humanity into these moral categories. There’s more than a little screwiness going on there.

Because, you see the thing with extremists is they’re people too.

Our deeply or even casually held beliefs act as a fluid, spreading into whatever vacuums we inhabit—contexts, basically. Circumstances which affirm or disaffirm our beliefs are both attractive in their own ways. Combine that with the attraction of a sense of belonging from a community of the like-minded, and the echo chamber spreads out these containers of belief. Soon you’ve got space for growth, or space enough at least to take from other containers.

Okay, I’m confusing my metaphors.

Point is, ideas solidify and get sharp edges in these small pockets of discourse. While we’re benefiting from a communal experience, we can lose touch with the world outside that room. Often the acceptance doesn’t come as cheap as the price that got us in the door. Like a 30-Day free trial, it’s a steep funnel. It’s the cost of continuing to receive acceptance within a group defined by an ever-narrowing definition of what qualifies as acceptable. For those who end up on the outside of that, we’re too busy trading values for membership to see them as people in the same way that we are people.

Maybe we’re not better because of our perspective. Maybe we’re standing in a different place. Though I can’t completely dismiss the idea that some belief systems have proved more beneficial more often, if the agreed upon reasons behind those standards are held so loosely or even given up entirely for the sake of loyalty to the system which contains them, then there’s no longer any worth to that system.

If there are inalienable rights belonging to all people, we cannot then deny those rights to any person. If anyone can do anything to deserve those rights any more or less than anyone else, then those are no longer rights but privileges.

But they are rights, not privileges. To deny them does not change the nature of the rights which by definition belong to all people. Instead, it changes the status of the person.

If there exists a system of control by which one can discount the personhood of an individual or group of individuals in order to bolster and maintain the power of the system, then that system cannot be entrusted with the defense of the rights of those it still considers persons.

It seems to me that one of the best ways to maintain such an imbalanced and untrustworthy system would be to treat all people as without basic rights (aka less than people) but with privileged access to controlled servings of rights measured out based on usefulness to the controllers.

Most of us go along with this commodification of our personhood willingly as long as we can be convinced that the marketable veneer of morally appealing ideas is simple and loud enough to dismiss suspicion of conspiracy. The times when we can’t be so easily swayed are dealt with by pitting us and our familiars against other similarly misled groups.

Sure we can’t just let our friends and family get sick and die, but then again treatment is so damn expensive. Conversely, everything is so damn expensive, so why should we be responsible to pay for someone else’s problems when we’ve got so many of our own.

Isn’t scarcity a tidy explanation for inequality? It does such a nice job of deflecting any suspicion from the mechanisms of the structure in which inequality exists, placing it instead on the effects of those mechanisms. It’s blaming four for two plus two. It’s blaming the shape of the hole for the very existence of the hole while the gravedigger’s busy with the shovel three rows down. But at least there’s job security in the death business.

Ever wonder why funerals cost so much?

So anyway, the thing with extremists is they’re people too.

While it may be soothing to gather in our cliques, circle up our folding chairs, and discuss extremism, under each seat are these index cards with a horizontal line drawn on them. On one end of the line you’ve got spoons and on the other you’ve got forks. And while we can all probably name a few distant outliers, I at least feel that—when I’m one hundred percent honest with myself—I’m somewhere in between the extremes. I’d guess that you might just maybe say the same.

We were one way and then something happened or we learned something new or we grew up in whatever way and now we’re different. Sometimes it’s a jarring change, but most of the time it’s a journey. It’s far too simplistic to say we encompass every possible rigid facet of the extremes of almost anything, at least when it comes to our thoughts and feelings about this ever changing world and the society in which we find ourselves playing a part in it. 



People, it would appear, are more like sporks.

The extents and percentages and shades are in flux and it’s rarely if ever some sort of binary, but being on this people journey means being somewhere on the often mercurial   spectrum of shifting perspectives. Certainly we may edge toward the extremes. We may trek as far toward one end of a multifaceted idea as we can find even the slipperiest of ground on which to steadfastly plant our flag, but even on those extremes, we are still a part of something which connects all the way to the other distant horizon.

The thing with extremists is they’re people too.

That means something even more extreme than the most extreme of extremist ideas. It means that they too are part of the line or the web or the net or the confluence or the knot or the big, messy wonder or that thing called humanity. Somewhere along that spectrum, they two found their reasons.

They too were heartened by acceptance.

They too were hardened by rejection.

They too stand in whatever spot they can find solid enough to stand on and look out across the landscape of their life through eyes honed by experience.

They too have just as much right to stand and to live and to look out as anyone else.

So here’s the problem with extremists.

They’re people too.

This means that when we say that this person or this group of people is anything but a part of our whole human tapestry, we cut a big hole in it around them and place that piece of majestically woven fabric somewhere outside the frame. We can cut that tapestry up any way we need to so it fits inside our most comfortable frame. We can chop it all up and put the pieces in a box to scrutinize one at a time whenever we feel like it. We can burn the threads that attached one piece to another. We can make all these separate pieces from this one big work. We can make it so small or pretend its so big but with all these bits ripped out.

And it was imperfect. And it was ugly. And it was confusing. And it was lumpy. And it wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t all good. But mostly, once upon a time it was one big work of art.

All this trouble to put people in their place, to segregate and discriminate and other-ize...

All it means is that we miss out on the big picture. 

Instead of dealing with the discord of our shared humanity, we create boxes and podiums and weapons for those its easier to see as less than human. We don’t take the time to think why someone else did something but only to declare that the way we feel about that something is the whole embodiment of who they are.

Good and evil, right and wrong, legal and illegal, proper and improper, fork and spoon all no longer have anything to do with what they mean for people with certain inalienable rights. These terms become hollow catchphrases by which we evaluate the worth of our personhood.

And if someone is less than a person, then how can they have a person’s rights? If we can be convinced that our very personhood and the rights therein can somehow be threatened by this being that is less than a person, what would we do to hold on tight to our belonging, our acceptance, our wholeness, our humanity, our personhood?

Would we deny the rights of another to maintain a system which has already been denying us our rights? If we are people then how can anyone say we could have our rights as people denied to us unless they saying it already saw us as less than people?

If our very personhood is dependent on the denying of another’s personhood, then how are we people at all?

If our access to our rights, our personhood, is contingent upon their protection via the dismissal of another’s rights, then how have we rights at all?

This is artificial imbalance. This is a manufactured scarcity of resources. This is the lie which says there is only so much basic human value to go around and it’s us or them.

Or perhaps it is better to listen to the pandering suits who are so convinced that only if the right people were killed then more people could live. Perhaps it is better to buy from a market which attaches the worth of a life to the contribution it makes toward keeping the rich rich, the poor poor, and those in the middle claiming their not being rich is because of the poor.

Perhaps it would be a better world if we would all just keep our heads down and do our duty. Life’s hard enough as is, right?

Why rock the boat (even if we’ve run aground)?

Perhaps it’s best just to leave it.

Or perhaps we’re sporks?

See ya later, 

O. A.