Xenophobia: A philosophic theory

Noun: an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange. (dictionary.com)

 

I have a theory about fear, so bear with me. I believe that every fear in the universe can be traced to one of two root fears: the fear of pain, or the fear of the unknown.

 

So many people fear death because no one knows for sure what happens to one’s consciousness beyond taking that final breath. Fear of the unknown. Many people fear hospitals because of the establishment’s association with illness and surgery (fear of pain). A child fears the dark for the reason that the dark creates a sense of unknown. Said child fears monsters because monsters could cause physical harm and pain to them. People fear war for reasons of both fearing pain and the unknown. People fear other people for their fear of the unknown.

 

This, my friends, is where I believe the foundation for fundamentalist religion and social prejudices occurs. People fearing people. People fearing the unknown. Therefore, fearing the unknown and unfamiliar is the root of so much unecessary animosity.

 

Every religion has a fundamentalist branch. Usually, such branches represent a vast minority of the religion’s population. But oftentimes, it is this small extreme base that yells the loudest and the longest. I think that it’s not an offense mechanism. It’s a defensive mechanism. It is the fundamentalist Muslims (the ones who are willing to strap on bomb belts for their god) who fear those who don’t share their beliefs. Perhaps they fear their beliefs being destroyed by outside religions. I cannot speak directly for them, of course. Regardless, this fear of the outside coming in to ruin their way of life is apparently enough of a motivation for them to sacrifice their lives in order to take out so many other lives.

 

Fundamentalists Christians follow a strikingly similar way of thinking (ironic, seeing as many fundamenalist Christians come with a heaping sidedish of Islamophobia). Only their defense is not outright murder (not counting if you’re gay or an abortion doctor), but infiltrating a public government that is meant to serve everyone of ever race, gender, and creed, and using said influence to preserve what they value. Fundamentalist fear their traditions being rendered obsolete, and as such, they fear what will happe to them on a societal level if their traditions cannot back them up. As a result of their atempts to infiltrate government, Congress bickers and can no longer come to a unified cause of helping their people, which is, what one would think, a democractic government would be for in the first place. The entire country suffers.

 

Bullies in schools cause others pain in response to their own fear of being socially ostracized. Being seen as vulnerable is scary for anyone, because no one knows what pain that could bring upon someone until they experience it.

 

You get my drift, yes?

 

I see xenophobia as the sole element that can destroy humanity. Fearing what is different from yourself (and, as such, fearing the unknown). What is the one force that can truly defeat xenophobia? Education.

 

You can’t always agree with other people. The world has over seven billion people, and as such, there are seven billion different ideas about the world and how it works floating around. But what one can do in order to inch that much closer to world peace is learning about that which you do not understand. Turn on the light and rid yourself of the dark unknown. Perhaps you’ll see that there aren’t any monsters in your closet waiting to eat you.

 

But so many people see violence as their only defense, even when education can be a much stronger defense, that I can’t see this rashness as anything but human nature. It is human nature to fear.

 

Maybe I’m starting to ramble a bit, but I just don’t understand why fundamentalist zealots can’t pull up information on those who they see as ‘their enemies.’ What is remarkable is how they all share the same thought processes, just switching the tiny details. Perhaps in discovering this, SOMEONE can show a little bit of empathy.

 

There’s your first step towards a better, more peaceful world right there.

Five Things I Learned After Reuniting With a High School Friend

Recently, just before the holiday, I met with Julie*, an old friend/acquaintance from high school. She was the first person-to-person contact I’d made with anyone from my high school years since 2008, when my former ‘best friend’ had found Jesus and subsequently deemed my company unsuitable.

We made contact on Facebook, and after Julie moved back into town, we decided to get some take out and gush over my cats for a few hours. It was a pretty average afternoon, but one of those times where, looking back, had a lot of potential for some philosophic feedback (yeah, only I would find philosophy in cats and Chinese food). We obviously caught up on our lives, and my story was, of course, typical: I thrived in college, made my true friends, found my calling, and am currently pursuing said calling.

Julie’s post-high school story is chock-filled with drama, and apparently I haven’t even heard the worst of it. I found her story to be the example of taking a little more time to grow up, but nonetheless, provided a lot to learn from. She married within a year of graduating to a man she’d known for years online. They moved to the other end of the country, and by the time I was throwing my cap in the air for my college graduation, their marriage was falling apart, and she moved back home to await the divorce proceedings. She is going back to college and still deciding what to use her degree for.

After our pleasant afternoon of Chinese and catching-up, and driving home after dropping Julie off at her house (only down the street from mine), it occurred to me that while I expected to be practically meeting a stranger, it almost seemed like no time had passed at all. I spent more time than I should thinking to myself later, and a few things came to me I wish more people realized:

1-      You aren’t the only one who wants to put those years behind you.
American media in particular seems to have this fetish for being young, and it always seems like the high point of experiencing youth is, of course, high school. I guess it’s really easy to romanticize high school, considering it still does embody the core of a young person’s life, while at the same time offering enough maturity to bring change, such as the end of puberty, the beginning of romantic and sexual pursuits, and being ‘adult-like’ without being old.

I find, however, that the media takes high school one step too far in that, from Grease to The Breakfast Club to Superbad and beyond, the high school experience is this be-all-end-all event that should be looked back upon as the best years of one’s life. For the vast majority of America, Danny Zuko never shows up, people don’t dance during detention, and you can’t get away with buying beer with a fake ID naming you ‘McLovin’. Therefore, high school turns into a major disappointment.

Listening to Julie talk about how she doesn’t miss high school any more than I do (and god and goddess knows I wasn’t a social butterfly in those days), lifted my spirits a little. In school, I was forty pounds heavier, didn’t know how to handle my mass of curls, couldn’t socialize worth a damn, and hated just about everyone outside of my immediate circle of companions. Not exactly the “Shermer High Experience.”

Essentially, high school was where I needed to be in order to get to where I wanted to be.  Now that I’m where I want to be (gainfully employed in a job I enjoy with real friends waiting for me at night on Facebook), the fact that I didn’t go to my senior prom doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.

2-      Silly high school things are even sillier afterwards.
I apologized to Julie at one point. “If there was anything I said or did back then that might have gotten on your nerves—“

Julie cut me off. “Oh no, you didn’t. If you did, it was so insignificant that I forgot it quickly.”

College did a lot for my social skills. Before that, I was probably about as socially clueless as a two year old at the White House Correspondants’ Dinner, as befits one with Aspergers. As such, half the time I couldn’t guess if what I was saying was offensive or not.

Alas, any fights that came of my social mishaps (and believe me, there were plenty), have indeed long since been discarded, and people have moved on. Those fights, at the time, seemed like the end of the world to me. It was a refreshing thing to hear that they were just as silly as they had been four years ago, if not more silly now. High school has a way of blowing small trifles out of proportion. It’s about misjudged priorities and how even the most insignificant choice of words can cause hell to rain down upon the world.

Even more basic, it’s about growing up and maturity. As much as you like to admit it, you aren’t 100% mature in high school.

3-      Our perception of time is screwy.
Julie herself didn’t seem to change too much. She was still petite, perky, and so gosh-darn adorable. She was still as nerdy as I was, and had that air of someone who has issues that bug her, but was glad she could forget them for a few hours while we conversed.

It only occurred to me that I was the one who had changed, and that I was the only one who could be the judge of that.

Yes, I learned how to style my hair so that it was tame but still an eye-catcher. I did shed some weight (ignore, temporarily, the fact that most of it was shed via eating disorder). I did learn how to properly socialize and have fun while not losing control of myself. But the true change lied within my growing up. Who I am as an adult is not even relatable to who I was as a sixteen-year-old. As a sixteen year old, I was boy-crazy, obsessed with fitting in but too lazy to do anything about it, and highly, highly defensive. Someone threw a single sarcastic remark my way and I’d beat the living hell out of them.

It’s amazing how four years can simultaneously seem like no time at all and an eternity. Reflecting on my changes, it certainly feels like the latter. But talking to Julie erased that somehow it was as if the last time I saw her four years ago was yesterday.

But then she tells me that one of our friends is married and recently bore her second child, and suddenly those four years multiplies by ten again.

4-      Moving on and looking back can make you laugh.
Yes, this is much like #2, only the point differs. Sometimes, looking back makes you cringe with humiliation even when they were no big deal. But not all embarrassing memories are bad.

Julie has a twin brother named Jack* who was also a member of my social circle throughout high school. In spite of the few little affairs I had here and there, and the stupid trysts that turned into painfully melodramatic nothings, I found a certain strength in my enduring crush on him. It lasted for three of the four years of my high school career, and it only got more potent each year. We did have our times alone together, when absolutely nothing happened. I was sure he didn’t like me in ‘that way’ and I was probably right. I was sure he was going out with someone from another school. He was the type to not fault his personal life, and I ended up letting my nerves get the best of me, and I never grew the pair needed to ask him.

Julie updated me on Jack as well that day: he never had a girlfriend after all, and is even still a virgin.

Hearing this made me laugh (not at his virginity, of course, that’s plain rude). But it made me laugh at how my emotions were on such a rollercoaster in high school that the idea that Jack may have eyes for someone else while I was convinced we’d have an apartment together in Greenwich Village one day with four cats and a Corgi further put into perspective how silly things were back then. I had no trouble confessing to Julie my old feelings for her brother, especially considering they are irrelevant now.

Maybe it’s memories such as that that led me to realize…

5-      Indeed, some things never change, but only the most worthwhile memories last.
High school sucked. No doubt about it. It was a worthless social nightmare that was blown way out of proportion by both my pubescent mind and the mass media, who kept insisting it was the time of my life. But, talking with Julie and the times we did share, made me realize that even the worst of experiences can yield some happy memories. It’s those rare moments that make you realize that yeah, high school is a miserable time in everyone’s life, but it may not have been suffered through totally in vain. I did learn, which, after all, is what high school is all about, and at the end of the day, I would not be the same person had I gone to bed at the end of middle school and woken up a college freshman.

So I guess I have Elmcrest High* to thank for that. So thanks. I hate you still, but thanks.

And also, thank you to Julie for being my inspiration for these thoughts.

*names have been changed.

Oh Fudge! Why The Stupidest Traditions are Also the Best Traditions

In my house, we have a clod of dog hair hanging off our Christmas tree every year. It’s as much a beloved ornament on the ol’ plastic evergreen as any other.

It came from an ex-dog of ours who now resides in the Blessed Kennel Club in the Sky, Finn. Finn was a hairy, hairy German Shepherd/Collie mixture, and he shed so often our poor Dyson couldn’t handle it. But the one place we could never seem to get all the hair off of him was the place around his touchas. Finn wouldn’t let us touch his hindquarters, and as a result of neglect, the hair there matted into a giant hair clump just beneath his tail, and it drove my mother insane. However, on his last Christmas on Earth, Finn magically shed the giant hair clod, right beneath the tree, a present for my mother’s sanity. She tied a red ribbon around it and placed it on the tree, dubbing it ‘The Magic Dingleberry of Christmas.’ In subsequent years without our beloved doggy, Mumsie still tears up a little when pulling the blessed wad of butt-fur out of the ornament case.

This is probably the most perfect example of why seemingly stupid traditions to one household may carry emotional memories and lots of love in another. We are probably the only family in the country that worships a hair clump at the holidays. Of course, that is only one of many of our family traditions that are ungodly immature and annoying, but yet we still manage to hold close to our hearts. The Magic Dingleberry might not even be the most profound, but it was the first one that came to mind.

But while I get into the heart of this post, let me relay to you a conversation between my sister and I (verbatim) during a viewing of the Rankin-Bass Holiday Classic ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’:

SISTER: Holy s***! Santa was a ginger?!? Mrs. Claus too??
ME: Yeah? So was Dumbledore.
SISTER: Does that mean all gingers grow giant white beards, get magic powers, and walk around in flamingly flamboyant robes with droves of admirers worldwide?
ME: I guess so.
SISTER: Just wondering.
ME: That evil mayor’s face looks like a hamburger.

Apologies to Rankin-Bass for defiling their beloved masterpiece. And believe me, that was the least random of our commentary.

I do adore this time of year. You really can tell a lot about a household by their holiday traditions and how closely they celebrate, if they celebrate at all. Some people are Scrooges. Their houses are bare of any holiday décor, be it Jewish, Moslem, Kwanzaa-ese (?), Christian, Wiccan, secular, etc. Others spare no expense, and buy up every possible version of a Frosty The Snowman 8-foot blowup for the front lawn (an example of this would be my Aunt Robin). Some people sleep in until 10AM, some people get up  at the butt-crack of dawn. Some break out the fancy cocoa, bagels, sausage bread, and some just don’t bother with breakfast at all. Every family is different, and I really get into how many combinations of traditions that can manifest on a single block alone.

This is also why I cannot stand the people who insist that ‘Happy Holidays’ is offensive to Christians, who would prefer ‘Merry Christmas.’ ‘Happy Holidays’ is all-inclusive of what is ultimately a month-long season that contains more religious and secular holidays than any other time of the year. ‘Merry Christmas’ is but one of those many celebrations, and the only reason it is so widespread to begin with is because Christmas is the victim of the most commercialization. ‘Happy Holidays’ is an abbreviation that only takes a moment to say. People need to get over that.

Same goes for ‘Holiday tree’ versus ‘Christmas tree.’ Yes, Jewish people don’t open gifts around a ‘Chanukah bush’ or anything, but do these fundamentalists realize that Christmas trees come from an ancient druidic and Norse pagan rite that involved entire villages of ‘heathens’ dancing around a decorated evergreen in order to ward off the cold and summon daylight? ‘Christmas tree’ has come to be the more typical way of referring to the tree tradition, but it means something different to everyone. To a Bible-believer, it may represent Jesus, while to me it represents years of epic gift-receiving and pre-game poking/peeking while Mum was out shopping. If anything, however, a ‘Holiday tree’ is more accurate a label, as the Bible never insists on celebrating Jesus’ birth with a big old tree in the living room. If anything, Christians should be importing sheep and smoking ‘frankincense’ but that only seems to happen on college campuses anymore.

Those who bring up ‘political correctness’ and ‘the reason for the season’ end up ruining the holidays for everyone else, as opposed to reclaiming it. How do these people not figure that out? Are these people the modern-day Scrooges who insist on having December their way or no way? Perhaps so. At least that’s how I see it.

So, too all of you: Happy/Merry Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Yule, Festivus, ‘Hi, Neighbor!” Month, Boxing Day, Las Posadas, St. Nicholas Day, and Holidays I Probably Forgot! May your season be filled with awesomely random traditions, and don’t shoot your eye out!