In my experience, people, by nature, like to help each other. Helping a woman who cannot reach an item on a high shelf at the market. Helping an older man who has tripped over a curb and fallen. Offering a meal to one less fortunate than ourselves. Assisting a neighbor whose house has been flooded by a swollen river. Helping someone get to the polls no matter what their political persuasion. This is generally true when we’re talking about an individual helping another individual. Usually color, creed, religion, ideology does not enter the equation. Someone’s in trouble or inconvenienced: We’ll often go help them. No judgements. No hesitation. No decisions. The human instinct is to help, setting aside all conditions to the contrary, even one’s personal safety at times, as in helping the victim of a mugging while that attack is taking place.
Even the right wing radicals of Charlottesville would likely react this way to an individual in need. But as soon as you dehumanize and demonize individuals into a maligned class designation, such as Jews, Blacks, Muslims, Foreigners, Hispanics, Liberals, and so forth, you open up a Pandora’s Box of actions often tinged with innuendo, hatred, and even violence based on some stereotyped, prejudiced image of each group. When we start judging people more by “the color of their skin than by the content of their character,” paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr., we open the door to an Archie Bunker-barrage of slurs designed to denigrate and disparage.
The solution to this emphasis on hatred derived from prejudice towards broadly stated groups is a long term one. It starts with [Read more…] about People, by nature, are…