Life in Contrast

Jason Thigpen
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Recently, I was reminded of Andy Rooney. If you aren’t old enough to remember him, he was a commentator for CBS News, showcased weekly on a segment called “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” on 60 Minutes. He was always, at least to my knowledge, a curmudgeon, and in my opinion, he was the best of them. Sadly, he passed in 2011, and the world is sorely worse off for his absence. He would tell a little tale (one that usually involved a bit of comedic irony), then through the tale itself and his editorial wrap-up, would communicate to his listeners why their lives sucked (because the tales he spun were always mightily universal) and some small bit of how they might make them better. Oh, and he was the only voice on TV at the time that could ever be thought sarcastic. No one else, it seemed, was allowed. Certainly no one else took it to the place Andy did, and even as a kid, I gobbled that stuff up. Loved it.

I think Andy Rooney did as much to shape my “voice,” as the writing community calls it, as did my Southern upbringing and my, let’s call it “diverse,” path in adulthood. I went to college to study English and Psychology, but never finished; I was too bad at math of any sort and too good at drinking and other stuff. Thus, over the past twenty-plus years, I have interspersed jobs in inpatient adolescent psych with consumer technology support to become the aspiring writer I am today. Thanks for reading the resume, and so, here we are.

What’s striking me as amazingly shitty here in our new-ish century is radicalization. Sure, we Western citizens — Americans, mostly, I assume of my readership, but North Americans in general and most Europeans — think radicalization, and our mind’s eye automatically looks east. The Middle East, specifically. We think immediately of someone different from us; someone whose burqas and female circumcisions and suicide bombers are intrinsically, fundamentally, and vastly different from us. “We would never!,” I can hear my Mom’s voice gasping, and her objection would not be to the blatant racism inherent in the prejudgment. No, her aghast objection would be to the mere acknowledgment of these towelheads as comparable in any way to us humans

…and this is radicalization at its finest. You see, when I was about ten years old, my aunt rented her house out to a family from out of town. Like, way out of town. The Sindhus were the first people of Middle Eastern descent I had ever even heard of (turns out, north Florida rural assville isn’t a big immigrant magnet). Hey, some of their stuff was different from ours; we had them over for a barbecue, they brought us a split curry chicken and rice and flatbread; my name was (and still is) Jason, their kid Americanized his name as Awesome. When I remarked how beautiful and huge their Doberman named Max was, they gave me a pup from his next litter. (The golden pup from that same litter sold for about three thousand dollars, and that was in the late 1980’s.) They were a wonderful, generous, kind family, and when they moved away, I was genuinely saddened and missed them. My mom stood up for these folks when the owner of the store they had moved in to buy decided, for pure racism’s sake, to jack the price of the store up nearly double. She was a social justice warrior way before it was cool, and now, she is a Trump voting, wall supporting, travel and immigration ban loving, right wing screwdriver.

How does that happen? How does someone — an otherwise perfectly rational person — go from writing blue Letters to the Editor in the 1980’s to waving a red flag over the heads of an army of Harley-riding gun-toters in the 2010’s? The simple answer is that we have oversimplified our lives. In an effort to make things make sense, we have turned everything into Good vs Evil. In a binary world, everything is either for us or against us, and that world is fictional. As in, not real.

So, let’s do an exercise here. Let’s all pick one person today that, prior to reading this, you had demonized. (Hey, they did it. I get it. They wronged you with no reason! That asshat.) Choose a coworker, maybe, or a family member, someone from whom you just can’t perceive anything other than malice or duplicity, and perceive something else. Try to get into this person’s head: What motivated them to get out of bed this morning? What will they dream about tonight? What good have they ever done?

I think it’ll teach you something. Oh, and while you’re at it, do this, too: Ask yourself how they see you and why. If we can develop a little more as people, maybe that will lead to more of it as a people. You know, land of the free, home of the brave, Statue of Liberty, yadda yadda yadda.

Jason Thigpen

Written by

Florida redneck transplanted to South Carolina redneckdom; I’m a million monkeys at a million typewriters.

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