Today is July the 4th and as it so happens this is the 250th anniversary of the day that our founding fathers declared their independence from their former parent nation, Great Britain. I hope that you all are just as grateful about that historical event as I am, but beyond that, I’m not really going to talk about it at all in this post. Rather what I am going to talk about is the fact that as a species, despite our projected veneer of independence and individualism, we are all in fact mutually dependent upon one another. This does not have to be a bad thing.
However as I have observed the behavior of members of competing political spheres over the last decade, namely those of the Conservative persuasion, I have constantly been awe struck by how often and how viciously they reject the notion of dependency. They seemingly believe that they can exist unbothered within the spheres of their lives by simply forcing the rest of us to live in accordance with the tenets they have chosen for themselves. This is very odd to me because as somebody who legitimately feels the need to preserve a sense of independence both in the technology and personal aspects of my life, even I recognize that in order for me to enjoy that kind of benefit, I must afford others the same degree of freedom. A failure to realize that the road of independence must run both ways is a failure to understand what independence actually is and actually represents.
Take for instance this past weeks Supreme Court ruling which allows states to exclude Transgender Athletes from School Sports. There are a lot of people out there who are deeply afraid of transgender individuals and act out of fear, maybe malice, to curtail their rights in every manner that they can devise. They want to regulate what bathrooms they can use. They want to regulate who can and cannot decide to take hormones or have the surgery required to transition between genders. They want to regulate what sporting leagues they can play in. The list here goes on and on and on. It’s almost as if they believe that they can simply legislate this group of people out of existence.
But why do they constantly act on this impulse? Who is threatened if a transgender girl plays on the highschool girls volleyball team? I am not. Who is threatened if a transgender male uses the mens restroom? I am not. Who is threatened enough to prevent a child suffering from gender dysmorphia from taking hormone treatments in an effort to resolve the torture of having to live a life in which they are constantly confronted by the ever-growing specter of incongruity? I am not. But apparently a lot of our fellow human beings feel threatened by these things and wish to act on those feelings. This is a position that I find quizzical.
Of course when it comes to this sort of honed and vicious bigotry, transgenders only just happen to be the current target in what has been a long line of them. None of the past targets (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, etc) has ever actually come off the list. Unlike the endangered species list, the targeted minority group list is a club whose membership appears to be permanent.
It is interesting to me that a lot of the people in our society who most strongly identify with the concept of independence are also the ones most quick to try and deny others access to their own inherent right to be independent. The very fact that they can do this and succeed as well as they have at it, belies a much darker and deeper truth though. Perhaps none of us are quite as independent as we’d like to think we are.
If it was solely up to me, all of the current Conservative efforts to deny any member of any minority group their rights would fail miserably. But again just like the Conservatives cannot legislate or wave away the existence of transgenders, we also cannot just legislate or wave away their existence either. This creates a bit of a problem. Beyond that, the harsh reality is that they are obviously very capable of negatively effecting the existence of people who are different than they. Moreover this reveals a deeper truth which is this: If they can do this, and presumably because we can return the favor, we are inherently dependent upon one another.
That’s right. As the old adage goes, “No man is an island”. Deny it though we may, we are always going to be faced with the fact that we must co-exist with one another. Don’t believe me? Remember the Nazis from nearly a hundred years ago? We collectively wiped the floor with their goose-stepping asses. Their entire apparatus was dismantled and turned into dust over a period of just a few years. Yet despite all of that, there are still Nazis running around who profess a deep undying belief in the so-called tenets of that deeply diseased and broken movement. We simply couldn’t kill enough of them. That’s ultimately because you cannot kill an idea. Just as you cannot bury a primal urge so deep that it ceases to exist. If somebody suffers from gender dysmorphia simply outlawing that condition won’t get rid of it, but merely forces those afflicted with it to seek out underground mechanisms for grappling with it. The same goes for Conservatives aka Fascists.
We must remember this. Each action we collectively take politically echos throughout the spheres of everybody’s existence in the nation, regardless of the groups and labels they respectively identify with and adorn themselves with. That’s because right now while the pendulum is swinging in a decidedly rightward direction, it will eventually begin to swing back the other way. Once it does, those on the right who were pushing it will begin to find themselves crushed by that very same pendulum. Once it does, those of us who were being crushed must remember this basic truth, otherwise we run the risk of creating a photo negative version of the hellscape they are now attempting to create. That is the last thing we should be striving for.
Remember, the unending efforts to purge society of people that have been labeled as undesirable or outside the norm, is a core component of a fascist movement. These movements build momentum by finding scape goats for the ills and woes of society and galvanizing resentment against them. While I myself am not a member of the trans community, I know that in time the perpetrators of this purge will move onto other groups. A fascist movement like MAGA and a fascist leader like Donald Trump can’t let up on the idea of “us versus them” for even a single second. That’s because their and his entire claim to political power rests on the idea that they are writing the wrongs that “others” have seen fit to bestow upon society. If there are no longer “others” to target, their inherent claim to power is lost.
So what should we do with these disaffected fascists once their tenuous and semi-clownish reign of terror comes to an end? That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? In truth, I don’t have an answer to that question. We, and I absolutely include myself in this grouping in a very literal way, once largely believed that education was the primary antidote to the problem of bigotry. But somewhere along the line that failed us as a society, didn’t it? We spent decades educating people via the public school systems that pushed back, at least in my own personal experience, on a lot of the hatred and division that the human race has indulged itself in over the course of its history. Yet a large portion of the people educated in this fashion have now consciously decided to reject these tenets and instead embrace rank fear and irrational hatred as legitimate reasons for attempting to purge society of those who threaten nobody.
I will take this line of thought even further by making the claim that nobody in our society is actually independent. We simply exist within carefully curated bubbles that allow us to believe in the illusion of independence. But if for example on this very hot and humid day, somebody driving by my house randomly decided to take it upon themselves and cut a line on my outdoor air conditioning unit, my ability to operate as an independent entity would come to an end, at least in the short term. That’s because without air conditioning, I won’t be able to sit here in my home office and write and edit this blog post. Without air conditioning, I won’t be able to film the video version of it directly afterwards. My illusion of independence would thus be summarily shattered by an event that exploits my dependence.
Dependence upon what? Well as a non-religious person, I wish I could find a better term for it and perhaps there is one. But as it stands right now, the best term I have for it is: Grace. We all depend upon the grace afforded to us by everybody else in society. I depend on the grace of my neighbors not to burn my house down with errant fireworks throughout the weekend. My neighbors depend on my grace to keep from creating visual and auditory spectacles that invade their ability to curate a tranquil existence.
To put it on a more practical level: I depend on trash pickup to keep my house from overflowing with trash. I depend on the water and sewer system provided by the city I live in to keep fresh water flowing into and waste water flowing out of my home. The city depends on me to pay my fair share of taxes so that myself and all of the other citizens can continue to enjoy these benefits. This sense of dependence extends far beyond the mere city and state I live in however. It goes even beyond the nation. In the age of nuclear warheads and ICBMs it is decidedly a global one. A theoretical example that demonstrates this could be something along the lines of: Russia decides to launch ICBMs equipped with nuclear warheads today and as a result everybody on the planet is going to have a really bad day.
One way or another we are all going to have to figure out how to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by the conflict between our individual sense of independence and the actual reality of our interdependence. Until we figure out the mechanics of that, I think that we would all be best advised to accept that the things that make society tenable and great, exist in a very tenuous state, doubly so right now. Mark my words, continuing to attempt to deny others the right to exercise their own inherent right to be independent isn’t going to get us there. We must do better than this. Because as of right now, we are really fucking this thing up.
If we don’t figure it out, then this vicious cycle will continue as it has for centuries now. Perhaps in terms of the human race, that’s our lot in life. However even if that is the case, I would prefer to spend my time striving for something better than what is basically a revolving door of misery in which the amount of misery you experience is proportional to what side of the door you currently happen to be on.
That having been said, I hope everybody out there has a great day and manages to find some joy in the occasion, American or not. Interdependent though we may be, we all need room to breathe and I sincerely hope that we will continue to try and find ways to afford people the grace they need to make their way through this confusing and often difficult life. Because down that road on the distant horizon lies joy.