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I'd be interested to know your thoughts and hope you don't mind this brain dump I'm about to unload on you.
When I was 14 and at high school the same bunch of 4 guys, all substantially bigger than me, would chase me around the school and beat me up. Not seriously, just enough to let me know who was boss. It was widely suspected at high school that I was gay. They did this pretty much every day.
They were bored.
I didn't realise this and thought that their activities were somehow directly connected to me, that I was causing what they were doing in some way. It took some time for me to realise that I was selected because I stood out and not because I was in some way bad.
I tried to make it stop in all sorts of ways, being friendly, being angry, fighting back (that just made everything worse - I've little patience with people these days who say standing up to bullies is the solution - these guys had made the decision that I was their fun and I wasn't going to be allowed to take that away from them).
It wasn't until we were in the middle of a chemistry class and one of these guys was pouring some liquid into a tube to try and get a certain measurement and remarked to me - "aw check it out I got it just right!" with a big, friendly grin, that I realised he had nothing against me personally at all. He seemed to think I was his pal, it was just that he was allowed to screw with me.
I should point out that I've totally forgiven these guys. One day they just stopped. I think they just grew up. Kids do dumb things sometimes. I'd rather they hadn't done it, of course, it took me a good decade before I could walk down the street without crossing it to avoid other people. These days I've no fear of pretty direct confrontations with most people but I wasted a lot of time being afraid. But that wasn't their plan. They didn't have a plan, it's just that they had this idea they were allowed to play with me however they liked and it wasn't possible to convince them otherwise.
It wasn't malicious.
I see this pattern everywhere now. With black people, disabled people, women, immigrants, people all over the world are stuck in this box where everyone's allowed to play with them. There's no plan to cause damage as such, it's just that there's a kind of switch that people use around certain groups that they seem to need to use, some people seem to need to treat other people as playthings. I think a lot of racists, homophobes and other bigots just don't get that they've flipped a switch. You listed to the way they talk about the groups they don't like and it's as if they're talking about objects or animals.
I no longer think of it as evil. I think it's just a cognitive error.
I think there's more than one kind of bigotry, I do believe in malicious bigotry, the kind that used to get black people lynched and gets gay people executed overseas, but there's flip-switch bigotry as well where the discrimination is more like a kind of release from internal stresses, taking comfort in the knowledge that there's someone worse off than you, that however poor or bad you think you are or are told you are there's always someone who's worth less than you and can be screwed with. I think most bigotry is a symptom of a kind of sadness, a feeling of helplessness.
I'm guessing a lot of you will be quite angry with that idea. Certainly whenever I see people asking victims to forgive bullies and move on it still makes my blood boil but as I get older I find I just can't sustain the anger. I don't want to stop being angry with the bullies but it's as if the fire is just dying away. I'm sure it's got a lot to do with the improvements in gay rights and not just that but improvements in the way ordinary people in my country (Scotland) react to gay people now (it's no different from being left handed or Polish or something). It's completely transformed over my lifetime. When I was a teenager I was a disgusting freak that should b exiled from society - now I've had three or four straight guys tell me up front that if they were gay I'd be the guy they'd want to be in a relationship with! The bizarre contrast between these two ways of being treated has given me a slightly skewed and cynical view of the world. "Yeah," I think to myself, "That's what you're saying now. What happens when it benefits you to change your opinions back, hm?" That probably isn't a reasonable idea, but it's difficult to avoid. I'm never really going to know if this shift in opinion is anything more than a society-wide fashion statement, am I? I don't want it to be, but seeing the way immigrants are being treated in my country and they way the Iraqis were treated by the soldiers of my country I have far less faith in the depth of my fellow citizens' conviction than might keep me comfortable.
People tend to believe what they think they're supposed to believe.
For a long time homosexuals were one of the playthings of British legal institutions. It changed but there's n reason to suppose it won't change back.
I don't want to be society's plaything. I don't want ANYONE to be society's plaything.
How do we go about getting human beings to take each other seriously?
I'd be really interested in the view of anyone who feels that an aspect of them over which they have no control has lead to their being slotted into a non-malicious "plaything" category.
I think there's a really astonishing amount of unintentional abuse of people going on that's based on a need to release internal stress. I think most abuse is of that form and that the kind of automatically accepted sadism we are now seeing all over the world grows from it.
I am slowly and reluctantly coming round to the idea that I can't maintain my anger with the world's abusers. I don't want to forgive them but it's beginning to look like it's the only way I can find peace.
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