Y2K-D2: EoMMXIX
My wife teases me about my prodigious use of acronyms. I can’t help it. Having worked at an agency, whose acronym is better known than its full spelled-out name, and renowned for its reliance on acronyms for just about anything, my ability for normal speak is corrupted. Acronyms of course are a short cut for a longer set of words. Examples include USA, TSA, BSA, NSA and BofA. Acronyms are like labels and labels are meant to represent something. We see the above acronyms and think “country, airport security, scouting, top secret spy agency, and big bank. Usually labels and acronyms are straight-forward. You just need the encryption key. If everyone has the same key, then it’s pretty easy. For example, most would recognize the title of this blog as “Year Two Thousand, Second Decade: End of 2019.
Words, typically nouns, are also representations. We don’t confuse the word for the actual thing. For example, the word “house” is not the same as an actual physical house. The word “house” represents a physical object that generally means a place where someone lives. Though someone from the Congo may visualize one type of structure when you say house (“maison” since French is the dominant language there), and someone from Vietnam may visualize something completely different (cho tro). Though what someone sees may be completely different when you say “house” in whatever language, more than likely the idea of “house” – as in a place where people live – is mostly consistent. Depending on how you modify the word house one might visualize something different, as in a dog house, a tree house, or a house of cards.
I dwell on this distinction because when it comes to words (labels) about people and certain phenomena (“weather”) our feelings about the actual thing it represents can get strange. Let’s start with weather. What comes to mind if I say “weather?” How about
“bad weather”; “horrible weather”; “perfect weather”? The words “bad, horrible, and perfect” are adjectives that describe a type of weather. I think they usually describe the degree to which the weather negatively or positively impacts you or your surroundings.
The distinction I want to make is this. Weather is what it is. We experience it and that experience gets judged on some continuum from horrible to indifferent to perfect. One may feel perfectly correct in judging, say a hurricane, as “horrible” weather because of the experience one has with that hurricane. That experience can range from an inconvenience - you have to evacuate your house; to catastrophic – you lose your house or worse, someone you love gets killed. Our feelings and emotions are often proportionate to the impact. You may be annoyed if you have to evacuate or you may be emotionally crushed if you lost your whole house or worse.
What I notice is that I have no control over the actual phenomenon (the actual weather). It is what it is. But I do have control over the labels (adjectives) I use to describe it. Why do I choose to label weather “bad” or “perfect”? What is it about my experience that causes me to attach those labels to my experiences? In my upcoming book “Manners will take you where brains and money won’t,” I talk about changing my relationship with weather simply out of my speaking differently about it. If it’s raining “hard” and I go out in the rain, that’s wonderful. I can get wet and soaked. I am reminded that I am alive and privileged to have this experience. Now, I may not enjoy the feeling of wet clothes or like dripping water in my house when I come inside, but so what? What is going to happen? If I walk into my workplace and I am completely drenched with rainwater, will they fire me? Will I catch pneumonia and die? Probably not. I might get laughed at and I might feel discomfort in soggy clothes. Great! I get to be laughed at and enjoy soggy clothes. So what? Getting wet may have consequences that you don’t care for, but I argue that there is no inherent “goodness” or “badness” in those consequences. My day is not ruined because I got all wet. I just got all wet.
The point of this is to encourage you to examine the labels you place on your experiences and observations. This includes your experiences and observations of people. This brings me to the delicate discussion of labels about people. Here are some labels I would like you to think about. Say each one and then pause before saying the next. During the pause, allow your mind to visualize whatever comes up. Don’t force any pictures or feelings. Just let whatever comes up to come up: Asian-Americans; Muslims; blond; Blacks; Jews; skinheads; illegals; right-wingers; radicals; wealthy people; blue collar; paparazzi.
When you paused and allowed your mind to receive whatever bubbled up to you, did you also, in addition to an image or picture, have any feelings about that image? Maybe you didn’t but can you imagine someone having a feeling? For example, does the label “skinhead” connote someone who hates or is violent? If yes, then how did that make you feel (e.g. uncomfortable, sad, disgusted, angry, indifferent)?
Can you imagine that most people conjure images of some sort when using or hearing these labels? Can you imagine that for many of these same people that there is some degree of feeling, sensation, thought, belief, emotion attached to the label? Let me provide a personal example. If I hear the term “woman”, the first image that comes to mind is never a woman who’s an Inuit Eskimo, or a Chechenian woman or a woman from Benin, West Africa. That is probably because I have never met a woman from those places. If there is no further descriptor of woman, I will think of women with whom I am familiar. Truth be told. If I allow an image to bubble up naturally the image of that woman will be Caucasian. Why is this? My theory is that I am used to non-Caucasian women always being described by their ethnicity or race or other descriptor.
It’s as if, for me, the default woman image is white. Without delving deeply into the myriad reasons (e.g. marketing images, that my own spouse is Caucasian, my social circles include many Caucasian women, etc.) I would like to suggest, without a value judgment, that these default images and subsequent feelings associated with them is how we as human beings can confuse the label with the actual being or person. It explains why I notice on occasion some Caucasian women will avoid me or secure their purse when near me. Somehow their labels of who I am (I will guess large, Black, unknown, potential threat) translate into a mild fear posture. It explains why I have a visceral reaction to seeing people doing the “Nazi salute” or who wear white robes and hoods. Not exactly a parallel comparison of course. The point is that it’s not the actual being that “caused” my reaction but my labeling of that being that caused the reaction. How do I know this? Because I know that the purse-clutching woman would probably like me and feel very safe and comfortable with me – if she actually knew and experienced me, and not her labels of me. I may have come across in public a man that seemed like an ordinary man and I think nothing of him. Yet, later that night that same man puts on his hood and burns crosses. I didn’t see THAT man. Had I seen THAT man, I probably would have experienced anger, fear and disgust. What’s the difference? The labels. Passing him on the street he’s just another ordinary-looking Caucasian male. Seeing him in his klan costume - well that’s the devil.
As an exercise, I try to catch myself reacting to the labels. I will ask, “Do I really know this person? Where did my thoughts and reactions come from about this person? Is it possible that whatever I am thinking is not correct? Have I confused the label for reality?” It’s not so much a matter of an incorrect judgment – your judgment may actually be correct upon deeper analysis, experience and with corroborating evidence. Or your judgment may be incorrect.
This is where I think we get into trouble. My advocacy is simply to notice and appreciate the distinctions between the labels and the reality. Catch yourself reacting to the label. When I listed the word “blond” above, did you visualize a woman? When you read “radicals” where do you think your images and emotions came from when you allowed both to bubble up in the pause?
You are not your name, your race, your profession, your gender, your size or your religion, though all these descriptors (labels) may deeply inform, impact, shape and govern who you actually are. My attachment to the labels limits the potential of my experience of the whole being, yet, sadly, I continue to be captive by my assumptions about what the labels I use mean. How many heavily tattooed, bald-headed white guys have I rendered completely invisible as a person because of my labels? How many people missed the opportunity to love me because their labels occluded the essence of who I am? For sure, clarity into the soul of a person does not guarantee that I would love the “skinhead”, or the stranger would love me. Getting to a more authentic connection somehow just feels liberating to me.
As an exercise, notice any labels you ascribe to people, especially those you don’t know. Any labels at all. Then notice any feelings that bubble up around those labels. Just see what you discover, particularly about where the labels came from, why you picked those to ascribe and where do you think the source of your feelings around those labels came from. For example, I recently saw someone sleeping on a bus-stop bench and labeled him “homeless.” My feelings were dominated by sadness and pity. I had to ask myself, where did I get the label “homeless” and why did I ascribe that label to this person? And why do I really feel sadness and pity? Truthfully, all I really saw was a person sleeping on a bus-stop bench.