There’s an old bit of folklore, told in various forms, about a man who got a flat tire and pulled over outside the fence of a mental institution. The story relates how, as he started changing the tire, he noticed a man on the other side of the fence staring at him. In one way or another, perhaps by being nervous of the other man’s stare, the driver loses the lug nuts for the wheel he’s replacing. After searching fruitlessly, the man behind the fence suggests that the drier use one lug nut from each of the other three wheels. The story ends with “I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.”
The story cautions us not to caricature or cookie-cutter other people, especially when there are strong identifiers that might prompt us to do so. In the story’s case, the presence of the second man in a mental institution might prompt one to presume that there’s nothing rational going on in his brain.
I was reminded of this tale when my friend E.D., a paramedic in NY City (whose writings will continue to appear on this blog), shared a bit about how crack users had figured out that taking a couple blasts from an asthma inhaler before hitting the crack pipe gave them a better high. They may be “crack heads,” but they’re also humans with cognitive thought and an interest in improving the experiences that make them happy.
I heard an interview with former baseball player Lenny Dykstra, who was hawking a book about his career. In it, he described not only his steroid use and the thought processes behind it, but also how it was better to play in a domed stadium in Houston than an open stadium in Philadelphia. The last bit had to do with timing his use of amphetamines so that they would “peak” at the right time during the ball game. In an open stadium, rain delays could screw with that calculation, it seems. My takeaway, especially as someone who’s never used such, was that a whole lot more thought went into his actions, medicinal and otherwise, that I would have surmised. Dykstra’s a person, just like you and me, and has led as full and complex a life as you or me.
Every person on this planet has a life of experiences and a brain that thinks about more than just the attribute we might assign upon first encounter. Each of us, as we live our lives, collects experiences, education, information, and ideas. Each of us chases whatever makes us happy or motivates us, and we often put a great deal more thought and effort into those pursuits than others who don’t share them give us credit for.
If this seems a bit pedantic, realize that many of us tend to make blanket assumptions about the members of identity groups, especially identity groups that are seen to stand in opposition to those we associate with, belong to or sympathize with. Today’s most obvious example of this is in the divide between law enforcement and the black community.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a police officer named Mike Dowd engaged in all sorts of criminal activity, and eventually went to prison for a dozen years. He’s out now, making amends and telling his story. In a recent interview, he made some astute observations about police violence:
Two things: Police behavior that is inappropriate is inappropriate. There is no excuse for it. The other thing I like to point out is this — we are asking human beings who are filled with emotion and fear and personal anxieties to do a job that sometimes requires a robot. A cop is a hero when he risks his emotions and his feelings and his life, to save someone else’s life. But a cop is a bad guy when his emotions get away from him and he injures somebody and has to act as though it was appropriate behavior, because now he has to cover his ass. He has to turn to his partners and those that have been there through thick and thin and say, “Hey, can you back me up? It may not have been the best thing I could have done, but my emotions got the best of me, can you stay with me and get me through this” — and a cover-up begins. Rather than a guy saying, “My emotions got away from me and I went too far.”
I discussed here and here the “protect your own” elements found in Dowd’s statement. The part that’s relevant to this essay is that police officers are people, not robots. Too often, those who take a dim view of law enforcement forget that, and forget that, despite the commonality of the uniform and job, the individual members of the law enforcement community can be markedly different. Each is a person like you and me, with a lifetime’s experience, with a set of wants and needs and desires and dreams, and we diminish that reality when we see them as carbon copies in blue.
All this is true for black people as well. It’s also true for liberals, for conservatives, for christians, for muslims, for wage workers, for business owners, for doctors, for patients, for men, for women, for gays, for straights, and for every member of every identity group that has ever been named. Again, this is rather didactic and obvious in the telling, but one look at the press and social media tells us it’s usually forgotten or ignored in order to drive an agenda.
It’s especially forgotten, dismissed or ignored by those who embrace big government. Such people subordinate individuals’ disparate wants and needs to imposition of behaviors that are deemed “best” for everyone. It’s “father knows best” paternalism, it’s a proclamation that “we know what’s best for others better than they do.” It ignores our individual humanity and presumes that we are nothing more than the stereotype of our identity group. It’s Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas condescension and a presumption that those who aren’t like us are too stupid to manage their own lives.
We caricaturize others in order to justify our believe that we know better. We cookie-cutter others to dehumanize them and rationalize our biases. We cardboard-cutout others in order to validate one-size-fits-all solutions that make us happy.
Those others don’t simply accept this, however. They are as likely to do the same to us, and are as likely to fight to impose their own one-size-fits-all solutions on us. As long as we continue to assume others are two-dimensional cutouts in whatever shape we see them, we will continue to have conflicts and strife.
The way to fix the conflicts in society is to realize that every person out there is a human being, one who lives as many hours every day as we do, one who has a lifetime of accumulated experiences, one who has his own story, his own history, his own thoughts, his own mental processes, his own needs, his own wants, and his own happiness. We cannot know what’s best for everyone else.
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