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I’m fucking tired of all these fucking labels.
Yesterday I was writing why men are from mars on my website. It was a long post; a sort of ultimate guide to men. Do you know what I realised? There aren’t many empowering articles for men out there. It’s either, “how to be a fucking dickhead and be proud of it,” or, “you’re an arsehole, you and your ilk will always be arseholes, live with it dawg” It pissed me off, because I think men should have this sort of resource at their fingertips. I’ve always believed men and women are equal, and that we want the same things.
A few months back I read that #whitegenocide was a thing in America, and that Donald Trump straight up retweeted from an account that supports this bullshit. Yet another label, added to the list of many, that no doubt some people will seek safety from.
I don’t like labels. I support individualism.
I’ve read in the past that labeling myself as a Human doesn’t support the causes of many ostracized and discriminated against groups. It takes the essence away from the cause that they are fighting; that my idea is a good one but it’s an idealists fantasy that has no place in the world in the current state that it’s in. You only need to watch Fox News for ten minutes to feel the systemic and underlying message of privileged white men in power seeking dominance over others. I’ll agree with that. I don’t like it, but I’ll agree with it.
I don’t think that I should stop with my message though. It IS a good one, and the more people I can rally to my cause the better a place I can make the world for the humans that live in it. I truly believe the world is a positive mindset away from an eternally blissful vacation to the paradise of your dreams if only you let it. We’re far from it yet because the media wants to keep us angry, in fear, doubting our safety — it’s how they sell their stories. Think, how often do we see good news? This is why I go out of my way to find it rather than let it come to me, which is never.
My idea is when you label people then you fail.
Everyone is different in their unique and own way. There is no typical Politically conservative person, neither is there a typical Politically liberal person. You will find that each one of us shares more in common than we do apart. When you grab a belief and use it as your identity, or other people’s then you do the injustice of not getting to know the deeper person that resides in there. There is the person that typically sits on the right of the Political spectrum and has hard-coded beliefs that a welfare state doesn’t work, especially when it didn’t work for him; not when his Gran needed treatment, and no-one would help. The leftist hates this person but forgets that he fights for the injustices in the world INCLUDING people like that man’s Gran who died of cancer untreated.
Whichever way you want to swing it, no amount of trying to tell me otherwise, or pigeonholing me into a neat little label will convince me that we don’t want the same things.
It’s a strange, strange phenomenon that’s sweeping the western world right now; people identifying their entire selves by their labels. You are a white, heterosexual married male. Who gets to define me by this? If someone wants to be defined as non-binary then can’t I be allowed to be called human?
I’ve watched as people refuse to engage in debate or even be friends with someone of opposing ideologies, yet rarely understand that the roots of such beliefs come from a similar background. It’s also known to me that a good 90% of voters vote in self interest in some form. My best friend is the Political opposite of me, but I understand his goals are the same.
It doesn’t stop there though; we’re now seeing gender being used as a label, where men and women alike are identifying themselves to be a certain gender. Sex, race, religion, you name it; we seem to all be rushing towards these ideals at insane speed in an attempt to identify, belong and create a community around these shared labels.
In my honest opinion this is doing far more harm than good.
We run the risk of thinking we are better than others because of the groups we belong to. It happens already; just look at the Klu Klux Klan for example — and how the fuck can that even be a thing in this day and age? In Britain, we have UKIP, a party that’s focused on British Independence and the ousting of foreign nationals, yet we feel it’s our privilege to walk anywhere we want to in this world. Our hypocrisy stinks and I hate it.
I’m not against ‘identifying,’ though. I’m Scottish and proud that I can bring an English town to a standstill as I walk down the town centre on my way to my friend’s wedding in my Kilt.
I love my roots.
I love that my accent brings some people to their knees. I enjoy reading that I have a vast cultural heritage spanning across several of the Nordic isles. It’s me, it’s who I was beforehand and it’s what I am now. I love to celebrate difference. Cultural diversity is one of the best gifts humanity gave us; I’d love to smoke a hookah pipe in Morocco or taste middle eastern breakfast cooking — this is all amazing to me. I celebrate it all, and I’ll never use it against others as a weapon either. I’ll never say my roots are better than theirs. It’s just, well, different.
But it’s harmful to polarize. You split into two what necessarily need not be split into two. I’ve always said we’re all different shapes, colours, sizes, sexes and beliefs of humans, but at the end of it all we’re human. We are stronger united than we’ll ever be when we’re fractured; fighting against each other in millions of little groups for essentially the same goals. Respect, honesty, love, integrity and all that belonging stuff. You may laugh at what I said but all I see right now in America is Republicans and Libertarians fighting over fake news and the 1%.
Yeah, same thing. It’s the illusion of choice.
My great ancestors were stripped from their roots; Bagpipes were made illegal, as was the kilt. Why do you think Scotsmen only wear their ancestral clothing on special occasions? My language is almost defunct, Gahdlig, or Gaelic you might ask is spoken by so few. Do I blame English people now for the faults of their ancestors? No. We live in a better world. White and privileged I may be, but I fail to see why we cannot move past our differences. As humans we stand beside each other together, as one, united.
Essentially, we all want to be respected and to belong somewhere. Is it too much to ask for belonging to the beautiful world that we call home? To show your fellow human some love and empathy regardless of their background?
The media tells us that we’re different, and that we should fear that difference. I say we’re human and we should damn well celebrate our differences. Life is far, far, far too complex to put people in neat little groups. The only one true Universal, 100% thing that you can truly say that everyone else is in this world is human. There are no exceptions to the rule; and it’s the only label with no exception to the rule.
Human.
We are all human.
Let’s start damn acting like it, huh?
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