Labels

This is something that I have always wanted to get down to writing after musing on various incidents that have happened as of late. Turns out 140 characters never sufficient for proper communication. With this platform of blogging perhaps my rambling thoughts could find a place on the internet where a billion voices are shouting out to be heard. Unfortunately, I can be unbearably lazy at times, and I have sufficiently procrastinated this for far too long, so here we are.

Labels are both a cop-out of proper understanding of individuals and a curtail of ideas. Yet it is part of human nature to look for the easy way in order to sum up a person within a few words.

Oh, he’s a Conservative, he must have supported George Bush and hate gay people.

Oh, he’s a Liberal, he must have supported Obama and hate gun ownership.

With the label nicely placed on a group, the nuances are lost forever.

However, some degree of labeling is still necessary for quick identification. A world without labels would be inconvenient and messy, a world with only labels is devoid of idiosyncrasies and quirks that make us individuals.

On the flip side, more often than not there are the times when you meet someone who says they are LGBT, and they give you nothing else to work with. The community label is used as their primary identifier, but they have forgotten to work on their other traits.

It would be nice if everyone remembered to come out of the closet with the rest of their personality as well, and not just because of an attraction to fellow men/women. One could come up with examples of funny/witty/edgy/romantic/sassy/snarky/waspish/phlegmatic/excitable as preferable primary identifiers, the gender label should always be an afterthought.

In a world where technology has overtaken the processing speed of the human brain, we often rely on our baser instincts to group ourselves and the people we interact with. As such, we need to take a step back and re-examine the labels we ourselves rely on and what labels we have ascribed others.