American culture today revolves around criticism of the entire political and social spectrum. Almost everyone is criticizing, and if you aren’t, then, well, you’re probably the one being criticized. A lot of people believe that others need to stop making such a fuss over our government, other people and how our society works. I’ll be honest, it does sound pretty intriguing; just accepting things the way that they are and not constantly tiring ourselves out by using our full mental capacity to worry about what’s going on in the world? It sounds like a vacation. But that ease of accepting our world the way we found it is the exact reason why we can’t, and it’s the reason why we need to question anything that makes us feel comfortable.
The foundation of the argument of not questioning is a very old and outdated view of kindness. It’s simple, and it makes sense when it is explained in terms of how it should be acted out. On paper, it’s the idea that we should always give everyone the benefit of the doubt because they probably didn’t mean to do something bad. It’s the idea that we shouldn’t put people in an uncomfortable situation just because they did something wrong. But when it’s really acted out on a large scale, it is also the idea that those who do good should be rewarded because they know that they’re doing good and that those who do bad should be punished, because they know that they’re doing bad. It’s a prejudicial system based entirely on our own assumptions and intuition, and if we use this system, we cannot recognize the intricacies involved in not only our own prejudices but in other people’s as well. It is not based on kindness. It is based on comfort, and if it is used on a large scale, it is destructive to those that fall victim to the majority’s prejudices.
I believe that I can speak for many people today when I say that we were taught to stand up for people who are bullied. Maybe a lot of us listened to what we were taught and actually defended those people. But that bullying was easy to recognize. It was spoon-fed to us on television, in films, in books, and in every lesson we were taught. There was always an easily distinguishable good and bad. These lessons did not prepare us for real life. Real bullying and oppression are complex, and sometimes, unless we are extremely educated on the topic, we do not even recognize it.
Real life is so much more complicated than a simple good and bad. It is so much more complicated than any single idea. For example, when we were taught the history of the United States as children, we were shown the Good Founding Fathers fighting for freedom against the Bad British Empire that wanted to force the Good American Colonists into the Bad Monarchy. We were taught that the Bad People wanted slavery while the Good People didn’t (which is an extremely white-washed version of our history, and it doesn’t address the idea that Hey, Maybe Black People Didn’t Want Slavery Either! But I’ll get back to my point.). What our history did not tell us is that those Good Founding Fathers were not perfect. A lot of them owned slaves, and Alexander Hamilton was involved in America’s first real sex scandal, in which he cheated on his wife. Thomas Jefferson was racist and raped Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, many times over the course of many years. Now, I cannot begin to assess whether our Founding Fathers were good people. Sure, they were incredible scholars and extremely well written, but I have absolutely no idea of what they were like. But this proof of depth and actual flaws in those we were taught to admire most reminds us of all the gray areas life is made of, and it reminds us that we need to rely on ourselves to become educated so that we can come to our own conclusions.
Those flaws and complications can give depth to those on the other side of the spectrum too. In our society, drug use is a criminal offense. We were taught to never do drugs because they are Bad and the police will put you in jail, and only Bad People go to jail, so that must mean that people who do drugs are Bad People. But as we grow up, as we become more and more exposed to drug use, everything will be complicated. We will see our friends, people that we like, doing drugs, but we had always been taught that people who did drugs were Bad People. We are comfortable with that way of thinking, and we are comfortable with that way of thinking because we have never been directly affected or challenged. But once we become directly affected, once we are challenged, that way of thinking will be threatened because we actually think critically. We will figure out that an action does not make you a Bad Person because an action cannot define you. What defines you is your response to that action.
We have always associated certain actions with Good or Bad, and when people execute those actions, the person is judged and put into one of those two categories. This way of thinking does not allow any room for learning and growth, and it is, to be frank, quite ancient. It focuses on the past instead of the future, and it is not what I think of when I imagine the America in which I want to live. It is all too familiar, though, since it is the America that we live in today.
It might not be easy to constantly be critical of everything we are told. It might be the hardest thing we ever have to do. But life itself is not easy, and we cannot live it like it is. We cannot use an outdated system of categorizing specific actions into good and bad and using those actions to define a person. We cannot make a real decision until we are educated about the decision at hand, and we cannot rely on other people to spoon-feed us information of what is good or bad. We have to determine it ourselves, because if we live without questioning anything, we will be easily taken advantage of, and we won’t survive much longer as a democracy. If we live without questioning anything, we will be complicit in our own demise. Questioning what we are taught is the only way that we can make changes and leave our world better than we found it.
