What are you for?

I was motivated to write about this topic based on a discussion I had this morning with my wife. We were talking about being ‘anti-’ certain things over the years. It got me to thinking about how ‘what we’re against, or anti’ seems to permeate more of the discussion than what people stand for.

One of the big things I have noticed recently is that, when you talk to someone about their individual beliefs, whether moral, political, or spiritual, what you’ll get is what they’re against. While this provides somewhat of a picture of what that person is like, it’s incomplete. It’s wonderful that people will take a stand against certain things, but you also need to be willing to support things as well.

Today’s society here in the United States more and more are considering many different things in life in polar terms, what I mean is topics of interest/discussion/disagreement turn are categorized by those involved as an either or proposition. I have found in my few years that kind of thinking just doesn’t work. There are far too many different positions on too many different issues. Putting things in an either/or statement is a great oversimplification, and the more you do that, the more people get offended, hurt, and then just decide to give up on the whole situation. In other words, if you’re not zealous for one of those two ‘poles’ you end up being apathetic.

Another result of people turning topics into either/or is: you start ‘hating’ the other side. This is too easy to see in the ‘blood sport’ of politics. Especially in the last 20 years or so, those one identifies as on the ‘other side’ of the political spectrum have been slowly made into ‘sub-human’ categories. Think I’m kidding? Just take a short ‘stroll’ through the many different political blogs out there and sometimes you’ll feel ‘dirty’ enough to want a shower. And that’s just what people are willing to say in public.

There are two different comments that I think of that can apply to this kind of situation. One is ‘if you don’t stand for anything, you won’t stand for anything’ (meaning that if you don’t believe in anything (apathetic), you have no tolerance and will not listen to anyone who does believe in something (anything really). The second has to do with history. Winston Churchill was commenting to a friend of Hitler about Hitler’s appeals to anti-Semitism, ‘anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker’. Put just about any ‘anti-x’ in for ‘anti-Semitism’ and it fits. The hatred of ‘x’ may be good to help get people on your side for a beginning, but sooner or later you’re going to be challenged by ‘Okay, so what are you for?’ If you don’t have an answer other than ‘well not what those people over there are for’, you have bigger issues than you think.