The Adverse Ideas We’re Leaving In 2020
Making this year great one better action at a time.
Written by Jake Levyns
courtesy of instagram: @rahelbrhane_
In our nation’s current state of sociopolitical discourse, not only has objectivity become a commodity but false information is so often passed as truth. This is perhaps even more amplified by social media, allowing unbacked opinions to spread faster than we’re able to register whether we can believe them. In a year like 2020, where the ideas of fact and fiction have been left up for interpretation, it’s about time we reconsider how we’ve allowed ourselves to buy into what we normally would know not to and what we can afford to let go of so we can continue a nonjudgmental dialogue again. Here are just a few such social habits we all should be working to dismantle in the new year and beyond.
The publicizing of political allegiances
No matter what you believe or what you want others to understand about their beliefs, it’s a safe assumption that we’ve allowed differences of opinion to dictate our relationships. I’ve had my fair share of confrontations over this with people in my own family. While you can’t talk people into changing their opinions over dinner, the least you can do is make it known how much someone’s words and actions affect you. And, for the sake of the children, take your flags and lawn signs down, cause frankly, no one wants to see that!
The normalization of racist & homophobic stereotypes
One of the most frustrating things to have witnessed through the past several months of civil unrest in America is the lack of communication about those affected occurring beyond baseless presumptions, the main one being how one’s existence in the world is seen to not matter at the level of one’s own life. This has been the centuries- and decades-old fight for the Black and Brown community and the LGBTQ+ community, all of who have seen little to no progress made and minds left unchanged in a moment that requires both to succeed. Expanding perceptions of marginalized communities start when we confront people with their outdated behaviors and undo the thought processes that bring harm to their advancement. Which leads to a final point:
The denial of unspoken biases
The fact is: we’ve all grown up being taught about otherness in ways we later learned to internalize as what should never be said aloud but is okay to believe because everyone does the same. This is the stem of all harmful biases, the hardest notions to shake when faced with the fact that what you were raised to think as true is false. To plainly say that we don’t have biases or prejudices toward other people is how they start and are spread to those who will believe what you say. Only when we admit our faults and open our minds to the experiences of others can they start to be undone, but we have to talk, think out loud, and get things wrong before that can happen.
Now playing…
