Identity Politics - Unifying Society or Dividing It?
We hear about it everyday in the news. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, LGBTQ, hetero-normative, Christians, Jews, Muslims, White Privilege, Male Privilege... We are no longer individuals trying to live our lives and not really aware of how every person that we meet and pass fits into society. We are now being forced into one category or another based upon not who we are, but where our existence can have the biggest effect for whatever the cause might be. I am not a man with a family trying to provide a reasonable existence for my said family, like myriad other family men. No, I get squeezed into categories like cis-gender, white privileged male, homophobe, and one of my favorites, Nazi! I howled at that one.
It seems as though there is a special interest group out there for everyone except the people that don't care what color your skin is, how much money you have, what your religious or political leanings are. We used to be a society wherein people went about their way living their lives. We would meet and conduct business with people without a care about anything other than if they were decent people and honest in their dealings. We used to be a society wherein we didn't notice all the ways that people are different from us. But that is not the society that we have today.
Everybody wants to be special. But in reality we are not nearly all special. Most of us are ho-hum, run of the mill people. But that doesn't get us what we want. We want special privileges and recognition so we join. We join to feel included. The problem with joining is that it also requires exclusion. When we say that "Yes, you meet the criteria to join this group", we are also saying to others "No, you don't meet the criteria". In a society that preaches acceptance and tolerance our actions speak louder than words. We are separating ourselves from others. We are dividing our cities and our countries.
We need to stop identifying with individual ideologues and start identifying as human beings. We are all created in the image of God himself and yet we are all incredible individuals. We have different giftings and interests, passions and dislikes. Let's get to know each other on an individual basis and stop letting the "leaders" and media separate us for their own purposes, supposedly to unite us, because it is truly tearing us apart.
It seems as though there is a special interest group out there for everyone except the people that don't care what color your skin is, how much money you have, what your religious or political leanings are. We used to be a society wherein people went about their way living their lives. We would meet and conduct business with people without a care about anything other than if they were decent people and honest in their dealings. We used to be a society wherein we didn't notice all the ways that people are different from us. But that is not the society that we have today.
Everybody wants to be special. But in reality we are not nearly all special. Most of us are ho-hum, run of the mill people. But that doesn't get us what we want. We want special privileges and recognition so we join. We join to feel included. The problem with joining is that it also requires exclusion. When we say that "Yes, you meet the criteria to join this group", we are also saying to others "No, you don't meet the criteria". In a society that preaches acceptance and tolerance our actions speak louder than words. We are separating ourselves from others. We are dividing our cities and our countries.
We need to stop identifying with individual ideologues and start identifying as human beings. We are all created in the image of God himself and yet we are all incredible individuals. We have different giftings and interests, passions and dislikes. Let's get to know each other on an individual basis and stop letting the "leaders" and media separate us for their own purposes, supposedly to unite us, because it is truly tearing us apart.
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