Why Is It So Hard for Us to Follow the Golden Rule?
Perhaps, it’s because we’ve been taught to do the opposite
The Golden Rule: Treat others how you would want to be treated.
A rule taught in many religions and by our parents, but which far too few seem to follow.
The unfair treatment of our fellow Americans occurs every day.
Every hour.
Every minute.
Every second.
Yet we get on with our lives. Because we got too many of our own problems, right? Don’t have time to worry about others.
That’s what we tell ourselves, and in doing so, we become complacent.
But then a wake-up call comes, except in a scream of a man begging for his life saying “I can’t breathe”. Now we listen. We listen and watch for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, but it feels like an eternity.
Black people say, “That eternity is our lives”. But now they have a larger audience. An audience that immediately understood that what they saw was 8 minutes and 46 seconds of absolute disrespect and hatred of one man towards another — all because of the color of George Floyd’s skin.
Shock echoes from city to city and across our borders, but the real shock is that we let it go on for as long as we have. Bubbles of social networks are instantly popped and we all feel a sense of humanity — a sense that was missing in this country and much of the world.
We look to what emerges from a society beaten down by a pandemic and now beaten down by police brutality.
Our fearful leader speaks of this ephemeral time when America was great and tells us we can get back there. Some people continue to fall for it — but reality will eventually hit them in the face like a sack of bricks…
America never was great. Not yet at least.
It was built on the very idea of disrespect, first with the Native Americans, then the Africans, followed by the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and many other groups of people in between. Their names lost to history besides a few.
And so the answer to why is it so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule is that despite the good intentions of our teachers to teach us to respect one another, we’ve been taught far more examples of how not to treat one another. All we have to do is turn on the news or go on social media to see countless examples.
It’s time to unlearn our disrespectful habits by looking to those in our communities that are showing us the way — to care about each other as much as we care about our own families.
We cannot look up for help.
We must look to each other and hold one another accountable.
The next time one of us is mistreated, I hope we don’t stand idly by and just watch.
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