Corona, Media and Taking Sides.
I feel I want to write something about taking sides. I feel like we are more polarised recently. Are you Trump or anti? Are you pro or anti mask? Are you vaccine or not? Which side are you on? Are you pro or anti China because someone may or may not have eaten a bat! This is polarisation, you have to be one extreme or another and the other side are wrong, the bad guys, stupid or even enemy. Don’t like Greta, say she’s mad!
I was recently told I am Sikh, I was told that the three main things that make a Sikh are truth, faith and service to humanity, as I am these things, I am Sikh (I have always been a Scientologist) but this wonderful inclusiveness literally made me cry. I am now proud to be Sikh, but this does not polarise me away from my Muslim friends, nor my agnostic ones. Indeed this does not polarise me away from my political left friends nor the right.
Politics recently and especially in the pandemic has been very polarised, you don’t like masks, then you must be in this whole camp and stupid too! With social media and air travel, and the internet we can connect so widely around the world and into communities we would not have known existed. I have a potter friend in the USA I met on Facebook by mistake. We share children’s book recommendations. I watch master kimono makers in Japan like I’m in their studio on Youtube. My friend from Kazakstan stays in touch via instagram, I think pre internet we would have lost touch after she left the UK…there is so much opportunity to make everyone on your side.
The dangerous thing about taking sides is you then need a side to go away to and be separate. So if kids pick sides then they say, our side is the half of the garden with the tree and you have the side with the flower bed, and you can have a snowball fight or ignore each other. All good. But there is only so much garden and at the end of the day we are all in it.
What is a closed system? A closed system is when you recycle everything around and around. Like a little space station with four people in it. No new stuff comes in so they recycle air, water etc. Imagine if these four people chose to polarise, the two people who believe in the tooth fairy against the crazy ones! Imagine then if the tooth fairy team set their own limits on use of resources and the crazy ones do too - without consulting each other! It is a doomed closed system, and very fast too. What if crazy side send a bomb to tooth fairy team? No closed system.
Well a planet is a closed system too. It’s not so noticeable because it’s quite big and complicated and has lots of languages and mountains and tennis courts and hot dogs, but it is a closed system too. Not much leaves and not much comes in. And if you let off enough bombs in one end the other end will suffer. Don’t like refugees coming to your rich country? don’t crate wars for them to flee! Don’t like poor people taking your wealth? Look for solutions to 1 percent of the planet owning 99 percent of the wealth. It’s a closed system, one garden, one space-station, one SIDE!!!!! You can’t afford to take sides!!!!
We need to communicate more with one another, we need to transcend polarisation and forge links, try to understand the other team, if you can’t at least respect them. The media and those who profit by chaos and war will always forward polarisation. You are in one team or another they say. You are with me or against me. Look what THEY did? Be outraged!!!! The truth is if you don’t like someone’s idea it’s their idea you don’t like, that does not make them your enemy. So speak out against their idea - don’t call them your enemy. Don’t call them crazy, don’t attack the person or group.
There are good ideas in every political spectrum, look for them, support them, look for what really helps. I don’t think anyone should go against their personal integrity and do what they feel is wrong, but a wrong policy is not always a symptom of an enemy. Ignore the rules you don’t agree with or speak out against them, that’s not the same as slandering the person who made the rule. Try to understand. Seek to be one team.
Corona restrictions have isolated us from human contact, cut down our travel and made our friends and family harder to see in person. So we are seeing our world through our screens. Don’t let that isolation colour your view of the world. What you see from the media and on your screens is a fear driving version of the world, a worsened picture meant to drive forward hysteria and polarisation for the profit of a few. The world is mostly a very friendly place, people are kind, towns and villages are safe, life goes on as normal mostly.
So this was a long rant in which I got a little over excited. I don’t mean to try to say I’m better than anyone else or perfect, nor am I trying to point fingers. I just wanted to offer the idea that we are all on one side and that picking sides inside a closed system does not have infinite workability.
I hope my thoughts are helpful to someone.
Love, Kirsteen
(The pic is me at the tomb of Marko Polo in Saville)
