For about five years, from the late 90′s to the mid 2000′s, I journaled nearly every day. In the beginning, I had a very cheery tone, with lots of positive affirmations and a desperately sincere desire to live up to a personal standard I had set for myself. Somewhere in the middle, I became much more sarcastic, cynical, pessimistic, and angry-sounding. Unexpectedly, I was also much more sincerely happy than I had been.
Somewhere along the line, noticing things to get angry about became a sort of hobby. Don’t let the ranting fool you: I’m really very happy most of the time. I can’t explain why anger at the injustice in the world and a near-total loss of hope for humanity’s overall redemption coincided with happiness for me (Stockholm syndrome, maybe?) but it did. Being angry seems to work for me, and I’ve found more and more things to be angry about.
I started out being mad about religious inequality. I used to call myself Pagan, and was able to get up a good head of steam about the ways in which my religion was not afforded equal treatment by the majority. I eventually came to call myself an Atheist, which is an even more fruitful ground for righteous indignation. After religion, I added relationship issues. I’m polyamorous, and there are all sorts of ways that society punishes me for my non-conformist relationship structure. From there, it was a short hop to gender, sexual identity, and race. The newest “isms” of which I’ve become aware related to people with disabilities and fat people. It turns out that we have enough discrimination and self-hate to go around to just about anybody, even groups that I wouldn’t have immediately identified as discriminated against.
As each of these groups came onto my radar, it was pretty easy to integrate them into my existing framework of non-discrimination, because the principles at work seemed to be the same. The reasons why I would discriminate against people are the same, regardless of which particular factor I’m basing the discrimination on. The ideological framework that leads me to try not to discriminate is also the same. I’m often surprised when I hear, for example, feminists, spewing hate-speach about, for example, trans-gender people, or gays, or what-have-you. It seems so obvious to me that the feminist argument is fundamentally the same as the argument for acceptance of other minority classes. Issa tells me that line of thinking is relatively new, and falls under third-wave feminism.
Each time I have become aware of a way in which I am unconsciously bigoted against a certain type of people, it has made it easier to accept the next time it happens. The more I do it, the more I am able to see people as, simply, people, and the more I feel able to relate to them, instead of whatever condition I am imagining obscures them.
