I'm a history major. It's my job to study people of the past, and part of that involves seeing things from their perspective, putting aside what people want to think their ancestors thought. It also involves finding patterns throughout history (ever hear the phrase "history repeats itself"?), and sometimes drawing comparisons between the then and the now.
Throughout history, people have tried to describe the reason for the turmoil and conflict around them. The buzzword on the headlines and in social media these days is "hate." Hate is blamed for everything bad that happens in human interaction, whether things as small as microaggresions or as big as massacres. It is what we use to find a reason behind either distasteful or violent behavior acted out by an individual to another of a different demographic. And while hate may certainly be a factor in these actions, a look at history, for me, has found a more frequent and reoccurring problem to be the culprit: fear.
We live in the age of media. Regardless of where you stand politically, you're likely to acknowledge that the media is very biased (in what way they are biased depends on your political stances.) The journalistic media will paint things this way or that, often to a hyped-up extreme, and social media is full of trolls. As a result, said trolls tend to be what people on the other side of a stance think of their political opponents.
A contemporary demonstration of this is the conflict between the two hashtags #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter. Without going into where I stand on the matter, across the internet BLM proponents label ALM followers as Nazis and slavedrivers while ALM proponents call BLM proponents things like terrorists and animals. Why? Because the trolls on the other side of the fence talk like said extremes. The result is the stereotyping I just laid out. Even though both sides have many flavors and stories and differences, it works better to a group's public advantage to paint their depiction of their enemies in broad strokes.
But where does stereotyping come from? Hate is what the media will tell you. According to the dictionary, hate is an intense dislike of something or someone. It's a lot less powerful sounding when you put hate into its context. It's simply a strong dislike for something, often out of irrationality. While this can be a factor, humans don't often irrationally dislike anything.
Throughout history, the real answer to stereotyping and chaos is fear. Fear is a belief (built on founded or unfounded evidence the individual puts faith into) that someone or something is dangerous to them and to society.
All one has to do is look at art and political cartoons from throughout the ages. If you look at paintings and cartoons from the European conquest of America and also the Westward Expansion, the Native Americans were depicted as terrifying, brutal beasts and a threat to progress, reason, and society. This resulted in settlers fearing for their lives, and it is in human nature to do something (even if said something is irrational) to destroy or at least contain that of which they are afraid. So that's what the settlers did.
Other examples in history, in different levels of extremity, include the Holocaust, the Civil War, the anti-Irish movement, the Cold War, the French Revolution, the Armenian Genocide, the persecution of the early Christian church in Rome, the Crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition. Historical events where such an attitude toward the opposing party was promoted by both sides, whether justifiable or not (that depends on your perspective), include the World Wars, the Hundred Years' War, the Luddite rebellions, the Irish War for Independence, the suffragette movement, the Roman invasion of "Barbarian" territories, and every presidential election in the history of America. The fear created was a fear that the opposition to a particular group would take something away from or destroy something belonging to them, whether material or figurative.
If you want some more proof, let's look at my last example. Every presidential election in the history of America, or at least since the development of political parties, has a similar theme found in the propaganda of the candidates' followers. The opponent is viewed as someone destructive, the last straw to break a faltering America's back. Cartoons are full of slime, even in the good old days. Just do a Google search and look. Thomas Jefferson was slammed for his love life. Abraham Lincoln was depicted as an ape. James Polk was drawn dreaming about the devil's wishes. Ronald Reagan was shown as hoping to start World War III. The goal? To create a fear of the other side and create them as an obstacle to be conquered, to create action. The action is sometimes purposeful, sometimes not. But destruction of some kind, whether of goods or names or lives, almost always comes into play.
And unfortunately, in any situation, this destruction only validates fear and widens the gap between the two parties, making any sort of (for lack of a better term) diplomatic and serious conversation between them (where they actually listen to each other's concerns) near impossible.
Obviously, this is a problem for society. What is the answer? To stop fearing? Well, that's hard to do when reasons to fear each other actually arise. There needs to be a willingness to break down pride and end the emotional Cold War between both sides, with both willing to at the very least listen to the other party. There needs to be respect (oh for a day when I stop seeing my newsfeed on Facebook comparing each other to animals and Hitler and terrorists and subhuman monsters and calling each other vulgar names, brainwashed and worthless.)
As a Christian, my conviction is that most of all, instead of fearing man, we need to respect God and His command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Love does not mean agreement on policies. It doesn't even mean toleration of another's actions trespassing your conscience. What it does mean is putting another first, and if at the very least you can do this by listening respectfully to their views. Do you need to respect their views? No. People do not need to praise me for my positions on economics and energy if they don't agree with me. Do you need to respect that they have views? Yes. People need to respect the fact that I have thought through my positions on economics and energy. And simply because I disagree with them does not make me one of the extremists you might find on the internet.
Do not allow the media to infect us any more with cowardice so strong that we would dehumanize those who stand on the other side of the fence. Don't apologize for your views, ever. You have the right to have and express them. But don't attack others in cowardly ways. Learn to rise above the fear.
