Or: Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
Note: This is one chapter from a book that I started a few years ago wherein I attempt to speak as an authority on subjects that I am not, by any stretch, an authority on. In short, a self-help/advice book that readers would be foolish to fully trust. Additionally, Wix does not allow footnotes, so this will be extra-annoying for you to read. If Wix allowed custom html tags, I could OnHover these and this would not be a problem. Get on it, Wix; hybrid editing is doable. I've done the best I can with section links.
Before the concept of Karma, before ethics, before morals, before religion, and before the standard and basic things that we all compromise on in order to function within society effectively, there exists you. If you know nothing else in this world, that is the one thing you can count on - you exist. Cogito, ergo sum. There are a lot of different ways to express that, but the general idea is that you can verify your own existence and nothing else external to you, therefore, for all intents and purposes to yourself, you are.
There are also a lot of cliches that you could conjure up for that basic idea, and a lot of critiques of it, as well, but I'm not going to dig into Heidegger, Kirkegaard, or any of the other multitudes of philosophical debates about the nature of existence but it's sufficient to say that we're here and can at least verify that we, ourselves, exist.
There's a lot of philosophical thought behind really basic concepts like life. Makes sense, right? Life being the one basic thing we can all agree we've experienced at least some of, so we have a bunch of thinkers staring at their own belly buttons and pondering on how to think about it and make it make sense. Because the other thing we can all agree on is that life is fundamentally crazier than a mime performing an aria.
The thing I'm interested in is how concepts like "you" and "them" are the same concepts in at least one fundamental way - we're all part of us. If one of us is deserving of compassion, all of us are, even the people that we don't personally like or agree with. It's not a hard ask from there to believe that everyone should receive kindness, either, and therefore we should all be kind. I'm not saying that we're all an equal part of some universal oneness (1), necessarily, but we are all made of star stuff (2) and will return hence eventually.
I have gone through a lot of soul-searching over the years; I was raised as a Methodist, then went through a bit of a philosophical upheaval and landed on atheist for a while, did the witchy goth thing, eventually joined a Buddhist temple, and I've been solidly agnostic for so long that I've now wound up being vaguely of the belief that Humanism is the way to go. My experience with belief systems is not uncommon - we all do a little soul-searching from time to time, and the major common thread running through religion is the concepts of kindness and compassion. In all of the religions that I'm aware of, those concepts feature fairly heavily - be kind to your neighbor, help people out, "Do unto others ..." and so on. There's good reason for that - believing ourselves to be kind and compassionate makes us feel better about ourselves and makes the world a better place. We all generally believe that we are ourselves deserving of kindness, as well (3), so baking these ideas into the core tenets of your chosen religion is only good sense.
We are all people. We all have our own moments of positive and negative emotions. We all have physical needs, emotional needs, and a need for safety (4). We all get up, eat, shit, bathe, and so on, up until the moment that we don't, at which point we become, basically, soil again. We all go back into the atomic bucket to decay into the world around us. We were all born, and we will all die. We will all cry many times in our lives, and we will all laugh. We all need human contact on a visceral level, even if we're introverts or misanthropes (5). We are all, in many ways, the same.
The further you drill into the details of someone's individual life, the more differences you see between people, but many of those differences are superficial. The more substantial differences come from life experience or are the result of social constructs - someone grew up poor while someone else has never known what going hungry feels like, someone never knew their parents while someone else takes theirs to dinner every week and someone else has a restraining order out on theirs, and racism and sexism are unnecessary but still impactful social constructs. But we are all still fundamentally human with the same needs and largely the same basic goals.
There is unimaginable cruelty in this world. I was lucky, in a way, to grow up in a place like the US where we've not once in my lifetime seen any acts of war perpetuated on us on our own soil (6). I have seen violence, strife, and violent death, but never on the scale of a war, like people in places like - to go contemporary as I write this - Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, or Ecuador. Children go hungry on a large scale all across the world. A substantial number of people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. Governments are incentivized to keep wars going, to keep strife and hardship alive elsewhere, because that drives economies. There are people that actively work to maintain this status quo, largely so that they or the corporations that they represent make more money.
The good news is that there are also people that actively work to make things better for no other reason than it's deserved. People make it their life's work to work against the war machine from within and alongside it. Charities exist to bring food, clean drinking water, and shelter to those that have no easy access to it. For most ills, there exists a person or a group that actively works to cure them.
You are not guaranteed to always have a roof over your head, to have food in your belly, or to be able to walk through a crowd and come out of it safely, nor is anyone else. The homeless person you ignore tomorrow may be you, at some point. The hungry person that you don't bump a sandwich for today may be you, next week. The person sitting in their car in the parking lot at Target crying into their hands might be you in a month. The person in prison serving time for a crime committed in an impossible situation that just needs a pen-pal and a willing ear may - no matter what you think now - be you, sometime.
If you are deserving of kindness and compassion, so is everyone else.
Be kind and compassionate. If you cannot find it in yourself to be altruistically kind and compassionate - being kind and compassionate for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do - then try to at least find common ground and apply the concept to yourself. Volunteer with organizations like Food Not Bombs, or the ACLU, or literally any charity that does verifiable good work and publishes all of their data. Volunteer to hang out with people at a nursing home. Take your elderly neighbor to their VA appointment every now and then. Give your money or your time to organizations that make life better for others. Listen to and engage with the child your coworker had to bring into work today because their babysitter's sick, and consider offering to tell the kid a story while their parent takes a break. Give someone a hug that needs it. For no reason.
Do it because you're a kind person, and do it because you need it, too.
Footnotes:
(1) I'm demonstrably not a hippie. That generation did some good, but they also fucked the younger generations with a forty-year-long pole, greased it halfway up, and let us slide back down before we could reach the top. Fuck them for that. Thank them for the civil rights.
(2) Apologies to Carl Sagan, but he was fucking right on a physical and philosophical level.
(3) Unless you're depressed, in which case - hello, friend, I see you.
(4) Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Yes, again. Yes, I do highly recommend you brush up on it. Call it homework.
(5) If you ever meet me, please, ask first, but if you're a hugger, I need a hug. A big, squeezy, bear hug. Maybe with back pats. If you also need a hug, let's do this. I might also be down for cuddles, but don't go a-fondlin' unless we talk about that extensively first but I'm fuzzy and soft at the moment, so I make a great pillow. Being held is the best feeling on the planet. Yes, better than a well-deserved and hard-won orgasm.
(6) Not visibly, at any rate, which is either true or true-according-to-classified-disinformation which is effectively the same thing.
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