Tonight I went to my first local school board meeting. There was a recent incident (educators being removed from their classrooms for social media posts on their personal accounts) and the group I organize with was asked to show up in support of the educators and their 1st amendment rights.
I spent the day preparing myself for a potentially combative environment (it’s been quite wild in the past) and another experience with MAGA supporters up close, but I don’t think I was prepared for what I ultimately encountered.
That room was filled with dehumanization.
My spidey sense first picked up a general feeling of contempt in the room, followed quickly by a lot of theatrics from the MAGA supporters: huffing, clapping, throwing their hands up in the air in disbelief and disapproval, scoffing, etc.
But as the public comments began, I started to see more of the vibe of what I find so difficult on the internet today, from all different people in the room. The high level of snark. A feeling that people are looking for the zingers and the soundbite takedown. High-fiving your group when you dunk on the other team. It was immediately an us vs them environment, everyone waiting to see whether the next speaker was on “our side” or “their side” to know whether we would boo or cheer.
I started to feel the mob mentality and how good it feels to dunk on the other team, especially when you get to celebrate with your team. And how easily it devolved into making disparaging comments about people’s looks and other mean remarks.
One of the moments that made me feel most sick was when a father came up to the stand and shared his fear for his daughter’s life based on a student bringing a gun to school (related to the suspended teacher’s social media comments). He was on the “other side” and his solution was more metal detectors (whereas mine would be no guns) and he was visibly shaken, teared up on the stand, and when he went back to his seat, he cried as he hugged his daughter. I heard two women to my left make a mocking “aww” sound and laugh as he did so.
I get it. Part of me wanted to scream that this wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have guns all over America and make them readily accessible and put them in the hands of young white men and how do you not see that all of these things are related!?!
And. I felt so sick seeing the two women mocking a man who is suffering with a very real experience of fearing for his daughter’s life. The way we divide and isolate and cut ourselves off from others is by missing the opportunity to acknowledge their humanity. Instead of saying “Hey, that sounds really scary, I don’t want that for you or your daughter”, we laugh at him?
It continued to get to me, people chatting with their neighbor when people they didn’t agree with were giving public comment, snickering, scoffing and looking to their peers for validation when they were incensed, etc. It seemed like such a warped sense of belonging through cruelty.
As someone who has been thinking deeply about kindness every day for about a year now, I felt sick, but I’d be lying if I didn’t feel sucked in at times! So I thought of all my Secret Society folks and came up with a new game to play to fight against the dehumanization in the moment.
I looked at each individual sitting in front of me and I imagined that each human was some number of weeks, months, or years away from being the next…
Tony McAleer, who spent 15 years in the white supremacist and neo-nazi movements before leaving and eventually creating an organization that helps others exit, Life After Hate.
Or the next Rich Logis of leavingmaga.org, who was a MAGA activist until 2022, when he had a change of heart and now helps other folks leave the movement.
Or any of the “formers” I’ve met listening to the podcast The Daily Former.
(It’s very easy for me to have compassion for them since I met them when they had already changed their views to align with mine…but would I have been able to find that same compassion when they were disconnected from their own humanity? I need to practice too.)
I felt so sick driving home. It was so clear in that board meeting how dehumanization is contributing to the divisive environment we’re seeing everywhere.
And let me be clear, I am very committed to fighting against groups that are trying to ban books, remove all aspects of DEI, whitewash history in schools, etc. (this is not an argument to agree with them or give them the benefit of the doubt) and I want to do that without falling into the trap of dehumanizing and getting baited by belonging through cruelty.
This is the question I’m sitting with after this experience.
What would it look like to be incredibly disciplined about compassion, kindness, and resisting the dehumanization of anyone who disagrees with me, while also being extremely strategic, dedicated, disciplined, and focused on fighting for justice and creating the world I want to live in?
That’s what I want to commit to. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
- Lindsay
P.S. This is part of the reason why I am so committed to the Secret Society of Unreasonable Kindness. I cannot stand the amount of dehumanization in the world and I need to contribute to a different way of being. It's not perfect, but it's a beautiful community of people trying to figure out how to create ripples of kindness and REhumanization, and I'd be so happy to share more about that with you at the workshop on Tuesday. Grab your tickets at unreasonablekindness.eventbrite.com and bring a friend.