On People and Objects

I'm really furious right now, guys. I just had a long debate with a former classmate of mine who I've known since sixth grade, and it left me with a very bitter taste in my mouth. I don't hate the guy. I just can't understand how it is he can believe what he does and still sleep at night.

American society is sitting at a tipping point right now, and the topic is human rights. The last blog post I made over a year ago was about this very subject, and things have gotten better since then, but they're still far from good. The big topic this year is women's rights, and my predominant focus is the "Yes All Women" thing that has been floating around. It's a hashtag topic that surrounds the idea that all women go through regularly terrifying and stressful experiences out of a taught and, in some cases, learned fear of men. I've been reading feminist articles and blog posts and posts from men defending themselves against Yes All Women with the "Not All Men" tag. This one claims innocence of part of men because not all of us are scumbags who want to rape you or sexually harass you or even intimidate you with our oppressive manliness.

I want to apologize now for not taking stuff like that seriously. I'm not insensitive. I've never been aware of the fact that maybe women don't want to talk to me because they're afraid of what I might do, because in all honesty I'm about as innocent as a seven year old boy when it comes to women. I've kissed all of two girls outside of a dating relationship in my life, and one of the two was someone I ended up dating seriously for two years. I don't think about how I might come across to women because I don't have a sexual intention in my interactions with them. I don't think about how they might perceive my actions or my presence because I have no ill will toward them and never have. It's never a thought that has ever passed through my mind. Because of that, I have fit into a category of men that has been part of the problem all along without realizing it.

We live in a society where women (and men, a parallel but not currently focal concern) are ruthlessly and intentionally sexualized for the point of marketing products. Whether they're selling perfume, soap, deodorant, music, sandwiches, clothes, jewelry, cars, tires, chairs, tables, carpets, etc, you can be pretty darn sure that women are going to be part of the method. Someone discovered that people are more likely to buy something if there's a picture of a pretty girl on it, and then they started putting pictures of more than just pretty girls on everything. Now there's an implication of sex in most if not all ads concerning women. Stage performances by female artists have become about as softcore pornographic as HBO television AS A RULE. You can tell which female artists are actually talented, because people rave about how great they are DESPITE their being 'unconventionally attractive'. The fact that people give a crap about how the musicians look at all tell you how deep this sickness runs in the people today.

So, society set a precedent. Great. Why is this a problem? Because people are impressionable. We took the example they set to heart and made it a part of us. Children of my generation were raised to understand that girls were supposed to be pretty and that guys had no greater goal in life than to date a pretty girl. Now, I was always a small, loud kid, and for most of my school career, I was younger than everyone in my grade by 12-18 months. As such, I missed out on a lot of that up and coming female attention in middle and high school, and I never learned how to play the 'boys chase girls' game. Girls went from being my friends in elementary school to being my friends in high school, and nothing really changed in between. I guess that's probably what set me up to be as much of an outlier as I feel I must be in all this.

Now, the problem here isn't that society raised boys to be a bunch of idiots who spend their time chasing girls and nothing else. Boys have always chased girls. The problem is that boys in our society have been raised to think that girls exist to be caught and won, like a prize. And that's all that they're here for. We were taught that if you chase a girl, eventually you will win her and she'll kiss you. The problem is that boys were taught this stuff, and parents didn't tell them otherwise. They let the boys of our generation be raised by movies and television that planted these lessons in their heads so deeply that men in our country today feel disenfranchised by the female gender as a whole when a girl won't date them. So disenfranchised in fact, that one man made a video about how he was going to punish women for not wanting to be with him, posted it on the internet, and then went on to murder six women and wound 13 others.

Part two of the problem isn't that the Win-yourself-a-woman mindset that we were all taught poisoned us forever. It's that absolutely no one in any of the insane number of rape, abuse, sexual harassment, and murder cases involving men assaulting women saw anything wrong with what they did. It's that the men got away with that mindset for so long that they finally started acting on it. It's that the general public tries to defend these men by demonizing the women they victimized. It's that so many women have grown up thinking that an object to be won is all they are, and so they end up in prostitution or abusive relationships because they believe they're truly happy there. It's that every single day, men walk around in this world, looking at women, unconsciously rating them on a ten point scale, seeing nothing but a potential girlfriend or sexual conquest. More than that even, it's that none of these men think there is anything wrong with those thoughts. They probably know it deep down, but they justify it because everyone acts that way. Everyone has those thoughts. It's not wrong. Those women are sexualizing themselves. It's only right of me to take advantage of that. Right?

The third part of the problem is that no one wants to stand up and change things. Everyone tries to cover over all these rape and abuse cases. Everyone wants to pretend that everything is okay, and that these are just isolated incidents. That's what infuriates me about Not All Men. That hashtag is being posted by men who are trying to proclaim innocence in all this. They're trying to disassociate from the problem by saying that they aren't causing it. They're trying to be neutral in a very major conflict that goes right down to the core morality of every man, woman, and child living in our country. And that disgusts me more than just about anything else.

This isn't something you get to cop out of. This isn't something you get to pretend isn't happening. Either you're intentionally fighting to stop men from sexualizing and objectifying women, to stop the media from being allowed to turn women into objects, to stop society from treating women as nothing more than a prize to be won, or you're letting it happen. If you don't spend every interaction with women throughout the day being intentionally kind and considerate for no reason other than that everyone deserves kindness, then you're allowing those women to have a shadow of a doubt in their minds that you might be a threat. The best way to make it known that you aren't a threat is to be so non-threatening that there's no way you could be mistaken for one.

Next on the list of things you can do to help is quit talking about the bloody friendzone. That's the disgusting child of the women-are-to-be-won mindset that's causing this whole mess. If you like a girl as more than a friend, tell her. The second you realize it, you tell her. Let her know where you stand. Don't let her assume that you're just being a good friend. And by all that is holy, DO NOT BE NICE AS A MEANS TO AN END. Be nice because it's the right bloody thing to do. If she's not into you, don't recant all the nice things you've done for her like you were paying for the right to date her. I don't want to hear a bloody word about chivalry, because chivalry was founded by a bunch of self-important clowns who tramped around shouting about honor and glory and spent most of their time knee deep in horse crap and filth and literally stabbed people to death for a living. They were mercenaries who tried to pretend they were righteous and wonderful.

I'm done talking about women specifically now. The feminism thing is big right now, but it's not the only thing that society is struggling with. Religion is another part. Race is another part. Nationality is another part. The honest truth is that people have trouble with other people in general. Whether or not we're different.

We walk around every day of our lives, seeing hundreds of other people and looking right through them. We look them straight in the eye and all we see is an obstacle, or a means to an end, or an annoyance. We don't see another person who lives and breathes and feels and laughs and cries and hurts the way we do inside. We don't see someone with their own family and job and stresses and fears and concerns and dreams and goals and hope for more than what they have now. We see bodies, sure. We see potential girlfriends, or potential competition. We see things we hate and despise, things we covet. But we don't see the person behind all of that. The person that wakes up every single day and lives their life the best that they can in hope of being happy someday.

The real problem with our society, and with our world, is that we cannot physically consider all of the other people on our planet as people all of the time. We just can't do it. We can't care about every single person every single moment of every single day. We do turn others into objects in our minds. Every one of us does it, and some of us more than others. I'm especially guilty of that. In order to make this world a better place, we have to stop looking at others like objects. We have to start actively remembering that every single person we meet is just that. A person. A human being. They're just like us. They want love and acceptance and happiness. They want their parents and their siblings to be proud of them. They want to do something that fulfills them inside. They want to live a life that they can look back on someday and smile. They want a family and kids, or a good career, or just a really good friend.

We have to remember that they're people too, and that everything we do or say to them will leave an impression on them, no  matter how small. We have to realize that one smile or one kind word can make a world of difference to them. We have to realize that all the things that we feel inside are mirrored in them, whether we agree with their lifestyle or not. Whether we like the same music or clothes or speak the same language. Whether they're as smart or as dumb as we are, whether they're ignorant of us or not. Whether they return our kindness and decency or not. We have to start giving everyone we meet the same common respect and decency, because it's what you do that defines who you are. I wish that every single time I did or said something to hurt or offend someone that the pain and hurt they felt was reflected back onto me. That I could feel the hurt I just caused them the same way that they feel it. I wish that everyone could feel that. Maybe then we'd start to realize just how much hurt we give out every single day of our lives. How much hurt we're pouring into this world. And then maybe, just maybe, we'd start to see each other as people.

The Rest of Your Life

Hello, audience. For those of you who don't know, I got hit by a car last week. I was jaywalking and not paying attention and I stepped right in front of a car. After the trip to the hospital and all the scans and x-rays and such, it turns out the only real damage was the gash in my head. They closed it up with stitches and ten staples, and I got the staples pulled out yesterday morning. Doctor says it healed up nicely, but now I get to have a scar on the side of my head for the rest of my life.

That's a weird thing to say, the rest of your life. When you think about the rest of your life, how far ahead are you looking? Sixty? Eighty? A full hundred? Where do you draw the line for a vague amount of time like that? How long do people think they are going to live? It's a tenuous thread, this existence we have. Everyday, we walk a line between life and death, an incredibly narrow edge. That show, 1000 Ways To Die makes a lot of jokes about death, and that's interesting to me. That we created a way to entertain ourselves with ridiculous stories of other people's deaths. But the show is right. There really are an innumerable number of ways, everyday, that people face down the potential of death and never know it.

I've thought about it a couple times, the potential to have avoided what happened last week. I thought about stopping to head back to the house and grab something ten or fifteen minutes into my walk before I decided it was too late and I should just keep going. I thought about how I could have scheduled the meeting I was on my way to on a different day instead. I thought about ho I could have just been a little more patient and just waited at the crosswalk. But none of that happened.

Don't get me wrong. My injuries are pretty mild considering my accident. Another guy came into the ER the same day from a similar accident. He had a broken collarbone and pelvis along with a veritable assortment of other injuries. I'm lucky that I got off with so little. I don't want pity or sympathy for my injuries. They're mine, bought and paid for. I get to deal with them, and I'm trying to do it without unnecessary complaint. I'm also trying not to be completely bullheaded and refuse help or sympathy when it's offered.

One of the things that weirds me out most is all the people who are super shocked and worried when they find out I was hit by a car. I'm upright and walking around on my own without a cast or neck brace and only the one bandage on my hand. Sure, I'm not in perfect health, but I'm obviously not dead. It's as if they immediately assume I should be on my death bed because of what happened.

It's moments like that that make me reconsider how normal the way I think must be. Should I be more in awe of how little I was hurt? Should I be super freaked out or weeping in thanks for my life? I feel like I should be considering my own mortality and rethinking my religious choices or something, but I'm mostly uninterested in that line of thought. It seems pointless to try and attribute what happened to fate or chance or the mysterious workings of some greater being trying to give me a sign or something like that.

My purpose for relating this topic to my accident comes mostly out of interest in how uninterested I am in the typical thoughts (or what I would consider to be the typical thoughts) one has after an accident like mine.

I was thinking to myself the other day about what it must be like to be dying and to know you don't have a lot of time left to live. To know that the clock is ticking down, that your life is definitely coming to a close. It has to be an incredibly surreal experience, one that is really hard to wrap your head all the way around. I can only wonder what I'd do at that point.

Life is long. I've probably only lived for about a quarter of what I can expect my full lifespan to be and I already feel old. I'm still only just getting started. I'm still unsure of where I want to go or what I want to do with my life. I don't now what the future looks like. I don't know how much time I have left. I do know that I'd like to travel. That I'd like to play music, and maybe to write seriously. I want to get married and have children someday. I want to have and adventure of a life that I can tell stories about. I want to live and breathe and experience and be in awe of this incredible world we live in.

There's a line in the song Polaris by The Human Abstract that sends a chill down my spine and leaves me breathless every time I hear it, or even think about it really.

"All the paths I've been down, I still have never found something lasting through the years but all these worthless fears that mean nothing. Compare your life, your love, to the vastness of the endless stars above."

This is my most favorite image ever. It's a picture of earth taken by the Voyager space craft as it left our solar system. For those of you who haven't seen this before, Earth is the pale blue dot in the middle of the yellowish beam of light on the right side of the picture. Here's a famous quote by Carl Sagan about it:

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

It's crazy to think about how tiny and insignificant we are compared to the entire rest of the universe we exist in. To think about the vast emptiness of space, the thousands of billions of planets and moons and asteroids floating endlessly around stars, titanic collections of plasma and gases that burn and rage with such unmatched fury and intensity and beauty that our minds can hardly conceive of their devastating power. I have a love of stars because they're so impossibly powerful and uncontrollable and immense.

My life will probably never make a huge impact on this planet, let alone the universe at large. I'm very likely going to be just another one of millions who were born, who lived, and who died here. I'll have some sort of impact, for good or for bad, on the people around me. But that's not really my goal. I'm not out to make a huge impact or to change the world or the way millions think or see life. I just want to have a life full of living, full of experience and emotion and thought. A life that burned with the fire and passion of even the tiniest momentary flash of heat from a star.