People

Something that's continued to bother me is the tendency of... people to refer to great numbers of other people in "blocks", as if they were a cohesive, rational, independent actor. You know what I'm talking about. Often, it's in a political context:

"Hollywood is indoctrinating your children"

"The Right hates the poor and the downtrodden"

"The government"

"The Left"

And although goodness knows I love generalizations as much as the next man, I think this type of blanket personification isn't helpful for how we understand the world. Hollywood is not some shadowy monster entity that is pulling strings to indoctrinate anyone. Are there people in Hollywood that believe radically progressive things? Absolutely. Are they creating content that attempts to indoctrinate others, in some sense of the word? Surely. But those are individual, identifiable people, each with his or her own goals, dreams, fears, agenda. The Right does not hate anything; the Right is a blanket term that describes millions of different people. Each may or may not hate anything or nothing at all, but it's unfair to paint all these individuals with such a broad brush.

According to Brookings, nearly twenty-four million people are "involved in military, public, and national service at the local, state and federal levels. Two million of those are directly employed by the federal government. The commentary on government bloat is not the point of this article. Does that help illustrate how silly it is to say "the government" did anything? (Yes, you can still say "Congress passed a law". I'm talking more about the regular people who show up to work every day in the post office or the DMV, and who did not do anything at all to marginalize minorities, steal the election, or genocide the Palestinians.)

When we narrow our understanding of the world around us (usually by not talking to enough real people), we forget that we walk around in a country surrounded by three hundred million normal people, each with individual thoughts (hopefully), desires, and beliefs. Every action is made for a reason. Because of someone. And all those actions affect other someones. People are not (or should not be) consumed with these rigid, grandiose conceptions of the world. The nation is not divided into a massive culture war, the Right versus the Left. To be quite literal: the Left is not real. It cannot hurt you. But liberal people are real: real people. Real people who actually are probably not on a determined mission to destroy everything you hold dear, and definitely don't consider themselves to be.

What I'm arguing here is good news, in a sense, but it also means more work: it means the world is actually a lot harder to understand. No, you didn't have it figured out already, but that's a good thing. For to understand the world, you must first understand people.