People Are More Than Their Governments
We live in a world dictated by information shortcuts. People learn one characteristic about who you are—your interests, your politics, your background, where you’re from—and they use that to fill in the rest.
All of us do this, at least initially. Most of the time, it serves as a draft for the person we’re getting to know, a rough sketch that gains clarity as time goes on.
Usually, it’s a negligible dynamic. On occasion, someone finds out I’m from Texas and wonders if I grew up in the countryside. Someone else learns I served in the military and attend church, and that shifts their guess on my likely political views. Another person learns I’m transgender, so that must mean I’m a radical.
This isn’t a criticism. We all do this, more often than not in an involuntary way. It’s human nature to try to connect the dots.
The problem comes when we settle on a person’s entire worldview based on this hasty reliance on information shortcuts. Instead of recognizing that we’re trying to connect dots, that person, whom we don’t know, becomes an oil painting, official and permanent.
Over the past year, I have watched people throughout our country lean heavily on information shortcuts when engaging with those around them.
In the eyes of many, if you acknowledge that Hamas is an antisemitic terrorist group, that must mean you support the mass murder and oppression of Palestinian civilians.
In the eyes of many others, if you believe Benjamin Netanyahu has been a cruel and incompetent and selfish leader, whose actions have made the world far more unsafe, that must mean you believe Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, much less defend itself.
Information shortcuts have enabled so many to push the absurd and destructive fallacy that people are their governments. Innocent Palestinian civilians are no more synonymous with Hamas than innocent Israeli citizens are synonymous with the Israeli government.
Meanwhile, there are countless civilians in Tel Aviv and Gaza and Haifa and the West Bank and throughout the region who reject this ridiculous binary thinking and focus on helping each other, regardless of their neighbor’s religious status and ethnicity and politics.
For those civilians, information shortcuts are a poor substitute for the necessary work of having hard conversations in good faith to better understand the complexity of the relentless, never-ending suffering.
In the United States, half a world away from that primary place of suffering, we are not doing a particularly good job in following their example.
Our politics have become so calcified that we’ve bought into the lie that giving an inch in good faith and proactive understanding must mean giving up a mile in our values and reasonable priorities.
For a nation that routinely centers democratic exchange as our first gift to the world, it’s difficult to say that we’ve lived up to that ideal over the past year.
I want the Israeli hostages returned safely. I want freedom for the Palestinian people. I want antisemitism and islamophobia to be unacceptable. I want civilians in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank to sleep safely at night.
I want the suffering to stop.
Any conversation on this matter not being directed toward that end feels like a waste.
