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I think, therefore I thought.
Oct. 5th, 2004 10:50 pmSomething Keith Green said in one of his songs seeped through to me tonight. He was singing about loving your enemies. And as I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that our society has become one where it is increasingly harder to love even friends, much less enemies, and at least part of that is due to the way we classify people.
By this, I mean that we have come to equate people with their actions, with words, with labels, and not as people with certain actions. Our labels place us, they are a way of categorizing us. A man is no longer a man with perhaps a few bad habits, a temper, and did a few things wrong in the past. Now he's a criminal, or a pig, or a jerk. A woman or man isn't a nice or mean person who happens to have homosexual urges, they are gay, period. A man isn't a man who does something to earn money, he is his job. It's one of the first questions we ever get asked in conversation, what we do. And from then on, we tend to think of people in those terms; banker, leader, scum-sucking lawyer, etc... Our society has come to acknowledge others as a string of labels and categories. What this means though, is that we have a much harder time trying to love everyone as ourself if we can only see them as whatever bad tendencies they may have. They may be rotten to their core, but in simply saying that, we negate any humanity they have, destroying any chance of helping them.
Just a thought.
By this, I mean that we have come to equate people with their actions, with words, with labels, and not as people with certain actions. Our labels place us, they are a way of categorizing us. A man is no longer a man with perhaps a few bad habits, a temper, and did a few things wrong in the past. Now he's a criminal, or a pig, or a jerk. A woman or man isn't a nice or mean person who happens to have homosexual urges, they are gay, period. A man isn't a man who does something to earn money, he is his job. It's one of the first questions we ever get asked in conversation, what we do. And from then on, we tend to think of people in those terms; banker, leader, scum-sucking lawyer, etc... Our society has come to acknowledge others as a string of labels and categories. What this means though, is that we have a much harder time trying to love everyone as ourself if we can only see them as whatever bad tendencies they may have. They may be rotten to their core, but in simply saying that, we negate any humanity they have, destroying any chance of helping them.
Just a thought.
