It’s Over. Now can we get to really know each other
Breathe. It’s over. We have a new president-elect. As I reflect on the campaigns, the rhetoric, personalities, attitudes, and language, certain words linger in my mind—words that resonate with my background, interests, and beliefs. Words like African, Indian, civil servant, immigrant, garbage, environmentalist, climate change believer, Muslim, migrant, brown, Ivy League. They’re just some of the many times I heard myself being called out during the campaign.
What I Think
To move this country forward, we all have to make a genuine effort to learn about, understand, and embrace the other. Why does that person think the way they do? What influences their beliefs? In what ways are we similar and different?
The Qur’an, according to Muslims like myself, is the word of God as revealed to Prophet Muhammad. In Sura (Chapter) 4, Ayat (Verse) 1, God reminds us that we were all created from a single being or soul. (If you're curious, you can find several translations of this verse here, keeping in mind that each translation is a human interpretation of the original Arabic.)
God also says, documented in Sura 49:13, the Almighty created us from a single pair and divided us into nations and tribes so that we may know each other.
Does this concept exist in other holy books? I'd love to hear in the comments if you know of similar teachings.
God didn’t intend for us all to be the same—our diversity is a chance to better understand one another and enrich our world. Imagine if we were all plumbers. Our communities would be chaotic without the unique skills of electricians, hydraulic engineers, chemists, accountants, and so many others who make bring fresh water to our homes.
Reflection at the Grocery Store
In many ways, COVID-19 has made us more insular. Recently, while at the grocery store, I noticed a cashier at a checkout counter with no line, no customers. His head rested on the conveyor belt, waiting for anyone who might need to checkout. Five self-checkout stations nearby were fully occupied. I made the conscious decision to approach him instead of going to the self-check out, and we struck up a conversation. I asked, “Isn’t it interesting that people initially resisted self-checkouts? But since the pandemic, we’ve come to prefer them. Now look at where we are.”
His response took me by surprise. He said he often sees people look his way, even make eye contact, then head straight for self-checkout. It got me thinking: how did our attitudes change so much, so quickly? Maybe it’s time to understand the psychology behind these choices and examine what it says about our willingness to connect with others.
Why You Should Care:
The words “One Nation, under God” used to be part of our collective identity in the Pledge of Allegiance, though even that is now optional in many schools. Each of us instinctively places others into a category of “the other,” perhaps breaking them into smaller, more distant subgroups. Immigrant, black, white, brown, educated, liberal, conservative. In this process, because of our inherent diversity, my own “bucket” of those people “like me” becomes almost empty. I am alone in my bucket because we are so unique, with our own beliefs, histories, and characteristics. Even close family members—spouses, children, parents—are different and not in my bucket.
Somewhere along the way, we took a wrong turn. The pandemic exacerbated that mistake. Now it’s time to backtrack, to embrace pluralism again, and to reach out and truly learn about “the other.” If we don’t, we risk becoming a nation of 350 million individual mini-states, each in our own bubble, rather than 50 unified, prosperous states.
I’ve been awake all night thinking about just these ideas. I kept the news coverage on long after the race was called and was struck by something. Some huge percentage of voters in exit polls or some such said that the “fate of democracy” was their primary concern. But the meaning of that phrase and what they actually feared were wildly different depending on party affiliation. Not opposite or perpendicular, but utterly incongruous in context, as if from two totally different conversations. However, I had to acknowledge that both sentiments were, if taken out of the present divisive political context, deeply patriotic and earnest.
ReplyDeleteIt’s hard to see the patriotism and hope in the political prayers of those we view as our opposition because we rarely engage in any discourse with them without instantly filtering what they say into one of an assortment of awful things that are “what they REALLY mean.” It’s similar to how we might scan an enemy for the twitch of muscle or shift of weight that gives away that they intend to strike. They are “other,” which means threat, which means that what they say can’t be trusted, ESPECIALLY if it sneaks past our defenses and intrigues us, or, god forbid, MOVES us. Mortal danger.
I think what the pandemic isolation did was add another aspect to that othering that has made things even harder, and your story about what the cashier saw helped me see it. It’s like in addition to our ancient vigilance for the “other” we might encounter, the stranger, I think maybe many of us have developed a much stronger anticipation that WE are the stranger to others. It’s not that those shoppers were rejecting the cashier’s invitation of interpersonal engagement as much as they were anticipating, assuming, that their move to engage him would be unwelcome. With intimacy comes vulnerability, and COVID has made many of us intensely vulnerability-averse, which makes empathy and compassionate engagement in difficult discourse nearly impossible. The amygdala hates trying new things and it sucks at making new friends.