Listening is becoming such a lost art. Soundbites, rhetoric, 30 second “debates” where no actual information is really exchanged, are the stuff we live and breathe. I mean, look at the National Anthem “to kneel or not to kneel” debate. Whatever side you’re on, you’ve probably noticed that most people don’t really care to understand the viewpoint of the other side, they pretty much just want to pick a side and stick to it and make sure everyone knows it.
I was talking with a friend yesterday about something I’ve thought about often lately. As I’ve gone from my 20s into my 30s, I’ve undergone several paradigm shifts in the ways I think about different things. What we were talking about though, was this concept that we, as Americans, like to hold onto a narrative that if a person works hard enough and makes the right choices, that life will typically go well. Some might call that the American dream, others might call that privilege. I grew up believing to my core, that I commanded my own destiny, and with the right combination of dedication, perseverance and hard work, I would have a life with no ceiling. And honestly, I’ve circumstantially been given a great hand. But is this true across the board for all people?
More and more I’ve come to realize both through real life relationships, and through reading about different cultures and life experiences in books and other media, that my experience is really not as normal as I had hoped. I’m learning that it’s a lot harder to create stability in your life when you don’t have health insurance. I’ve heard that it’s a lot harder to “just get a job” when you are trying to rebuild your life after you’ve been trapped in an abusive relationship and are now trying to help your children heal from the trauma. I’m hearing that even though we like to believe that racism is a thing of the past, people of color in our society still experience it on a regular basis in everything from schoolyard slurs to being disqualified for a job.
It’s not as black and white as I used to think.
This has been one of the major ways I’ve been surprised by adulthood. I thought we would all get here together and experience collective upward mobility; but instead I keep hearing stories of injustice, abuse, discrimination, and heartache, that cripple people.
(PC: Fransisco Moreno on StockSnap.io)
So this life plan of ‘graduate high school, go to college, get a job, buy a house, get married, have kids, live the dream’ isn’t exactly an a+b=c scenario. There are a whole lot of other factors that can rob people from getting to any of those American dream benchmarks, and yet instead of experiencing heartache alongside of them, so often we like to wag our fingers at them and say “See? You just need to ________.” or maybe “It’s because you didn’t __________”
It’s a lot easier for us to feel justified in the life we’ve earned and crafted for ourselves when we are able to look at what everyone else is doing wrong and point the finger. If we stop pointing the finger and instead look with compassion at circumstances that are bad luck at best and terribly unjust at worst, we might be forced to realize that our whole empire we’ve built for ourselves was not totally our own doing. You see, if someone else’s American letdown is due to circumstances outside of their control, might also our American dream be due to circumstances outside of our control? You know, like where you were born. You didn’t really get to decide that. Or who your parents were. Or the schools your parents placed you in. Or the fact that you were protected from abusers in your childhood. The trouble is, when we stop to consider all of that, we get to take way less credit. And we LOVE to take the credit. How we build our lives, how we manage our kingdom, how we achieve, achieve, achieve, is up to us and no one else.
Or is it?
I’m not discounting human autonomy and the drive to improve our selves and our situations, or saying those are bad things. Those are very, very good things. I’m simply saying that there’s more to the equation than just those things. So maybe if we could just stop: Stop to listen, Stop to consider. Stop to empathize. Stop to understand. Stop to give some thanks for how much we’ve been given.
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