Aboard the sinking ship

A new awareness

It’s easy to look at slavery in America and fail to understand how humans could have treated other humans in such inhumane ways. “If I was around then, I would have never done something like that.” “Just because everyone else was doing it, that doesn’t mean that I would have to.”

Try to empathize with a slave owner for a second. They were doing what they were taught to do, by the ones that they loved. It’s so clear how ignorant those teachings are today. It’s so clear because we’ve learned from that moment and have evolved as a human race. It’s an unbearable pain to carry when one thinks of the many historical moments that are just as terrible to the human race as slavery. Let’s not compare these moments, however, pain is pain.

When one of us is imprisoned, we all are. When one of us is ignorant, we all are. The actions of the Holocaust affected far more than the Jewish & German people directly involved at the time. It’s an unbearable pain to carry when I empathize with all at that moment. Even when I think about what their families today could be going through, it’s an immense amount of suffering. I remember the first time I watched “Life is Beautiful”, directed by Roberto Benigni, how many tears I shed that night.

And yet, the humanness within these moments is appalling. These people may have never thought that they were doing anything wrong at all. They may have just been doing what they were taught to do. Under the assumption that they were living a life that they and everyone else in their society agreed was the one to live.

Crazy, right? They were just like us. They had families just like us. They had love interests and went through heartbreaks, just like us.

There are qualities within these people that we can see within ourselves. What most can’t get past is the horrific actions that these people participated in. It can be hard to see yourself within a racist.

This reminds me of Carl Jung’s term, the shadow self. Jung proposes that this self contains all of the parts of our personalities that we choose to reject or repress. The parts that we don’t like or that we don’t think society would like. How could we relate to something so harsh when we push those things within ourselves away? People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves. You can only meet people as deeply as you’ve met yourself.

Just like us. They were just like us. Eating food, singing songs, raising kids.

What happens when we turn the lens upon ourselves? What is it that we are doing today that is another one of humanities horrifying flaws? If you gave it some thought, maybe it’ll become clear to you. If it has, welcome aboard the sinking ship.