Can’t We All Jus’ Get Along? Food For Thought Part 3
Part 3
Food for Thought
“Can’t We All Jus’ Get Along?”
Rodney King
Someone once told me “thinking is having a conversation with oneself.” A conversation I recently had with myself included sushi, a lake in Yellowstone, tether ball, snails, Frederick Douglas, oysters, handshakes, Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, not always being Caucasian, and Zen Buddhist koans. See? It’s all complicated.
The conversation started with the package of sushi I bought at the supermarket. I could see the oblongs of sushi rice topped with pink shrimp and dark purple tuna and my salivary glands went into overdrive. The old saying, “we eat with our eyes” raced from its hidden nook in my brain to the forefront of my consciousness. The problem was I couldn’t actually eat with my eyes—the damn plastic package that encased my sushi was resisting every attempt to open it. I tried prying open the clear plastic lid with my fingernails, a nail file, a screwdriver, all without success. Desperate, I searched in the kitchen cabinet for some C-4 before my eyes alit on a pair of huge scissors. My conversation changed from talking to myself to addressing the sushi package. “Okay, Sushi, I bought you!!! You are mine, you %$#$%# , off with your head!” and I clamped a big corner of the package in my scissors and squeezed. The package burst open, the plastic lid blew off, and I suddenly was sprayed with sushi shrapnel. When the force of the explosion was spent, I looked on the floor splattered with pieces of tuna and shrimp violently separated from their nests of rice, as fragments of pickled ginger and splashes of light green wasabi mustard seeped into the troughs of the tile floor. We eat with our eyes. I switched the conversation back to myself. “What difference does it make?” My brain is telling me that the food does not look appealing, but it tastes the same as it would if I pulled it out of the package whole, n’est pas? Still…..so the conversation evolves into an argument between me and me. “Eat the sushi—-it’ll still taste good.” “No, it doesn’t look right. It is not sushi anymore.”
Please understand, I have this constant war with my brain. To be more specific, and accurate, some part of my brain does not trust other parts of my brain. See? It is complicated. But I understand me. I understand that my brain is just trying to protect me. I learned in my binge reading of neuroscience many summers ago that the brain’s prime directive is to survive. That is its job—to survey the thousands of pieces of information flooding it every second searching for potential dangers and working hard to make sense of it all. And sometimes, to make sense of it all, it lies to us. Example: when you were a kid and your parents are driving on a highway on a hot August day, and you look out the front windshield and you see a water puddle on the road ahead. When the car arrives at that spot, there is no puddle of war—-what happened to it, and why was it there in the first place? The heat waves emanating from the highway surface confounds our brains. Our brains ask, “What seems to behave in that shimmery, wavy way? Water!!!!!!” So we see water where there is no water. I have learned that I can’t always trust my brain. See? It’s complicated.
And because our brain’s prime directive is to survive, we are, I believe, born to be bigots. I thought a great deal about that statement. We like to romanticize our cave people ancestors, huddling together around a fire, huddling in fear of saber tooth tigers and the dark, but basically loving people following a paleolithic diet, and who hugged strangers and sang koombya around the flames. Truth is all strangers to our fire starters were to be scrutinized and assumed dangerous. Villagers along the Silk Road may have accepted strangers because they brought trade, but they also brought disease and strange habits and they often carried weapons. The handshake became an accepted ritual of greeting because the stranger extended his right hand to show no weapons and thus no ill intent (lefties had a sinister advantage!). So the brain, obeying the prime directive, tells us we should be suspicious of difference—-any difference. In fact the brain would probably be quite relaxed if all it met were people who looked exactly like its owner. How boring would that be?
So our default stance is that we feel uneasy and insecure about difference. We like likeness. We like sameness. Our brain judges and says, “Same good, not same bad.” And this judgment by the brain is constant, never ending, as it sorts incoming information and tries to make sense by fitting the news into categories and slots and comfortable closets it is familiar with.
Our brains love to label. At parties when we meet new people we begin the labeling process. Where do you live, where do you work, where did you go to school? Our brains try to label everything so we can make sense of it all. We label people by the cars they drive, by their dietary habits; we label students (and students live up to [or down to] our labeling.
And when we find it difficult to label, our brains sometimes get frustrated. The truth is that all of us human beings are complex, but most of our brains like things simple. Actually, fascists and racists and nationalists and all kinds of dictators use this fact to their advantage. What they promise is that their subjects won’t have to think. They make it simple. “We good, them bad.”
Remember tetherball?
A professor once explained the concept known as the “Analogy Tether.”
All of us are tethered to a pole, and as we grow older, more experienced, and, hopefully, more educated, our tether lengthens, our radius extends to accept and even appreciate differences. Bigots can be very loving people. They just tend to love a very small group. Their analogy tether is very very short. Sometimes I think bigotry is very comforting, warm and cuddily like grandfather’s red plaid blanket. The best part of being a bigot is that you don’t have to think. Of course, the downside is that you have to stay under the small blanket. You can’t go outside, stretch that tether and bask in the warmth of the sun.
At the beginning of one school year, as the students filed into one of my classes, I was fumbling around my desk searching for a seating chart I had made, and I was rifling in a bottom drawer when I looked up, and a rather tall lad with a multicolored mohawk haircut, red and blue and green hair, stood in front of my desk with a smile on his face. I recognized that look. He was waiting for this new, old fossilized teacher(I was thirty-two) to freak out when he saw the coiffure. I smiled and, I admit, the sadist in me surfaced—I did not want to give him the pleasure. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” No freakout.
A shadow of disappointment swept over his face. I immediately felt guilty. I stood up and explained as I shrugged my shoulders, “Hey, I’m from the sixties.”
He shrugged his shoulders and sat down. My analogy tether had been stretched to include people, especially students, with multicolored hair.
We tend to make judgments based on our schemata, what we think we know. When we see something new, we search our mental closet to see if we can match it with anything familiar. Bigots have very small closets. And their logic may be sound, but thee premises are not true. “I saw an elephant. It was pink. Therefore all elephants are pink.”
“I saw three Moslem women wearing burkas in the town square. They were doing nothing but talking. Therefore all immigrants are lazy and suck up entitlements like health care and welfare.”
The beliefs of some bigots are so firmly entrenched in the mud of ignorance that even undeniable truth cannot dislodge them.
I was not always Caucasian, you know. I remind some of my relatives of this and they say, “Whatta ya mean?”
I mean that Italian immigrants (as well as some other European immigrants) were not considered white.
“In 1911, Henry Pratt Fairchild, an influential American sociologist, said about new immigrants, “If he proves himself a man, and … acquires wealth and cleans himself up — very well, we might receive him in a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him.” https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-always-considered-white-and-acceptable/
How can some of my relatives not be empathetic with new immigrants? See? It’s complicated.
What is also complex is how we address difference. For example, I struggle with the phrase, “people of color.” People who use the term “people of color,” are usually white people which confuses me because my schemata always told me that white was a color. If white people are not people of color than are they colorless, transparent, cellophane?
So are we all doomed? Is the human race destined for erasing itself from the face of the earth because we make snap judgments about the “other” based on hairdos or beliefs or eye color or pigmentation? Does our fear about the other cause us to ironically violate the brain’s prime directive—to survive?
I have a slight hope my species will prevail….very slight. I believe that dramatic change comes about for two main reasons: catastrophic events (dire circumstances) or great leadership, great leadership inspired by a long analogy tether.
Dinosaurs are wiped out by a meteor or a microbe and life changes. The bubonic plague changes the economy of Europe. World War II rearranges the map and politics of the planet. Or leaders change things by the force of their commitment and vision. Lincoln, Ghandi, King.
I think the first guy who opened up an oyster didn’t think,
“Oh my, this looks delicious!!” He/she was probably enormously hungry. I think the visionaries came later. “With some lemon juice and a dash of tabasco this bivalve mollusc would be a delightful hor d’oevre.” Or the first human to see a snail inching across his path must have been ravished with hunger to pop it into his mouth.
Later came the epicurean, “With some garlic butter baked in an oven I will wow my guests…cannot, of course, call it ‘baked snail.’”
On one of my trips to Yellowstone National Park I stumbled across Sour Lake. I spent some time peering deep into the grayish, yellowish, aquamarine colored water and thought about the first human who discovered that the water was sour. He/she must have been one thirsty homo sapien.
So do we have to wait for disaster to wake us from our slumber of bigotry, from our hatred of the other because of beliefs or skin pigmentation or culture. Maybe. The only non-violent way out of this morass, as I see it, is education.
In the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, Mr. Antolini, the English teacher, tries to explain to Holden Caulfield the importance of learning. “An education grows your mind.”
Another way to look at it is that education stretches that analogy tether so we are not afraid of the other. We look at the oyster, the snail as possibility. We see other cultures as potential. An education helps us not only to accept difference but to appreciate the possibilities that differences offer.
The problem with this tact is this simple fact: before a child reaches the age of nineteen, he/she spends ninety per cent of his time out of school. Do the math. A school day is eight hours long. What is the child learning from that other sixteen hours? There is a Zen Buddhist koan (riddle) that asks, “Who were you before your parents named you?” This is often interpreted as “what is your identity before the culture you were born into filled your brain with values and beliefs?” Did your culture shorten or lengthen your analogy tether? So even if all formal schooling was devoted to lengthening and strengthening the analogy tethers of students, what do we do about those other sixteen hours of education? I don’t know.
I do know that Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, shared an epiphany that opened my eyes. Traveling north on the train from the South, Douglass expects that the towns in New England, having not used slavery as an economic underpinning, would be poorer than the homes in the South. He found just the opposite to be true—–the northern communities appeared more prosperous and healthy. In the South there were a few Tara-style plantations, but most whites lived in far poorer abodes. And his revelation was that slavery shackles not only the slaves but the slave owners.
Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery decided to spend the winter on the banks of the Columbia River. The winter was rough, and food was scarce. The Columbia River had salmon, but the members of the expedition would not eat the fish because that is what the natives ate. Here they are nestled on one of the world’s greatest fisheries and their bigotry almost causes starvation. Another example of the bigot becoming enslaved by his own prejudice. See, it’s complicated.
Mark Twain described his six month enlistment in the Confederacy in Missouri.
His company ambushed a Union courier, shot him off his horse. Twain watched the Union soldier gasping his last breaths. Twain writes something like this: “I guess that is what war is all about—the killing of strangers that, in other circumstances, we would probably enjoy a drink and conversation with.” Our brain initially fears the other, and our culture feeds the fear and then the labeling starts—-wop, mick, rag head, yellow peril, yankee….and then the killing begins and we offer up our humanity to the “Same is good, not same is bad!” gods.
We can start to figure it out if we ask our brains to relax, to be secure, to seek out possibilities, to just ask the question, “Why can’t we all get along?”