As we speak, the world is getting terribly polarised everywhere. We are stretching our capacity for ideologies and beliefs to incredible extents, letting the cracks speak more than our views themselves. We're creating islands and we're not even trying to build bridges between them. This is making the ideas in our heads increasingly idealistic.
It's worth taking a step back and just, for a moment, consider what brought us here. Is it the pressure that blew, pent up for all those decades and centuries, that it just had to blow? Are our differences really worth it? Let's delve in without trying to set everybody else on fire for not aligning with what we hold true.
We need to understand, first, that all political views begin with identity, which is why we are so vehement about them. When someone's against you, it's like they are being denied a part of what is essentially, undeniably, and unarguably themselves. It's as sacred as anything can get. Even if a set of views don't actually take away any of their freedoms, they are taking away their potential to exist in the way they are and choose to be. This Identity is also a (relative) definer of truth. Any view that's opposite to theirs hints at their truth being wrong and their dentity just won't have it. It, otherwise, wouldn't be worth following as much.
The second thing we need to understand is that identity is (for most) defined by power. We get our identity depending on which side of the fence we historically fall on - both individuals and community. In that sense, identity can be a privilege or a curse. And if you're the better off, you spend all your life defending it. If not, the less said the better. Sometimes, the mere pride you get to flaunt isn't enough. As they say, it's lonely on the top and that gets to the head. You need an "other" to make the kick that flaunting delivers worth it. That bring us to the others - the worse off.
The worse off are always in the shadows. The better off aren't responsible for what their ancestors collectively made of them (ending up on their side of the fence). They just carry it forward instinctively, and collectively, without blinking an eye lid, finding ways to make the others their own personal court jesters when they're not ignoring and dismissing them. They believe that when equality became a thing (after it was fought for, if it was won), it demolished that fence. And, then, all those decades, centuries and possibly millennia of oppression just vanished in that instant, and now all's perfectly well. The better off have no idea of the lack of privilege that they never had. They'll never know the pain the negative multiplication of various factors - poverty, discrimination, lack of opportunity, oppression, being trampled on and more - of every kind, across generations, which is a chain that has never stopped. They only know the truth of plenty, at least access.
Thus, all humans fall into either of these two categories - the powerful and over-powered i.e. the better off and the worse off. Both are not complicit in how they got there. They were not party to the power play that preceded their individual privileges and defined their identity. But they are party to what happens under their watch that will define the future generation. They can stop the chain, or derail it, only if they have that power.
To do this, individuals and communities have to identify their power status, each. For those worse off, it's easy. They live, breathe and choke on it everyday. They'd derail it at the first chance they'd get, if they could. The onus of change lies on the powerful - the better off, if they'd only step up and identify the bug. Their comfort is the others' pain. They survive of blood that would not belong to them in a world where power is obsolete. That's why such a world is the only solution available.
But it won't go away that easy, if it is going to go away at all. The problem is that they, themselves, are the bug. Power is them and they are the power. Take it away and you'd be asking for them to vanish because that's everything they are - even when it's nothing they did to fall on their side of the fence and inherit it. Soon enough, everything becomes emotional. Any sliver of chance that they spot the bug in themselves is lost. You don't convince your oppressor by speaking to their morality. There is no easy way out of this tussle between the pulling and the pushing. The only thing that's for certain is that it will go on till there's a victor and no one's inclined to give up, give in or cease fire.
While we are pushing our edges more with time, we need to understand the key to why we disagree so much, and that whatever we fight about is about who we are, essentially. We are being ourselves perfectly as we exercise it our power statuses, which is the problem. You shouldn't expect any less from anyone who hasn't been educated or exposed beyond the comfort of their immediate world and culture. If the best hearted humans saw aliens in person, they would be racist to them too. That's the ideal instinctive response. But those who have had the opportunity of educating and exposing themselves beyond their own little world have the knowledge to go beyond their instincts and act like they know better. When you don't still, change is still coming, but a long way off.
When it's the powerful vs. the powerless, depending on your local context it can be colour vs. better colour, race vs. superior race, ethnicity vs. other ethnicity, people vs. different people, and privilege vs. lack of it. Remember that with the powerful, you have to first forgive them for they know not what they do. Truly. That's before you call out the bullshit and fight back.
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