"We Become What We Behold" is a short game created by Nick Case in 2016. The game starts off with two groups of people randomly walking around a TV, a group of circles and a group of squares. The player then takes pictures of various events happening, and that gets broadcasted onto the TV. However, people seemed to take more interest in negative, violent events rather than news that focused on positivity and love. What began to happen was one square caused other squares to hate circles, and then circles soon started to hate squares. What followed was building hatred as the TV only broadcasted hate and separation of the two groups of people until one circle shot a square dead; soon the whole society was in mayhem and people started to die, those that didn't die killed others preemptively. I strongly recommend playing this game but this article is not about the game itself but the meaning behind it, "we become what we behold."
Ever since the 2016 election this nation was never at rest: people were aggressive for differing views, numerous scandals, school shootings, international relationship crisis, trade wars, family deportation, etc.. Every step we take as a country seems to be sending us closer towards destruction and unrest. What we get from the media everyday now is simply bias and negativity rather than factual news that's clear of personal opinions. Our tolerance of differences between each other as a nation seems to grow thinner and thinner ever since the election.
In a way we are the people in the game, shaping the tools that turn around to shape us. We choose a president that represented our zero-tolerance and fear of outsiders. We elected a president that valued the nationality of people rather than the character of them. We wanted a president that focused on our fears rather than our values. We shaped the office of the president to be him, and now he has come back to shape this nation. We allowed a few groups of people to decide the future of this country.
I recently watched a Ted Talk video about an African American man befriending a leader of the KKK and what he had to saw to the audience is what I'm trying to get to. In the video, he concluded that the reason why racism exists is that of fear. People saw that the color of their skin was a difference between them. Thus they were scared because they weren't like them. We fear the things we don't know or understand. The same thing is happening right now; why are there people that fear illegal immigrants? It's because we don't know what they'll do and we have no way to keep track of them; we don't know them. Now that we're scared we grab our guns and protect ourselves while giving access to guns to people with bad intentions.
This is like a cycle; we choose to put a man in office that represented our fears and in turn that fear turned us against each other. That fear showed disrespect, intolerance, hate, isolation, and separation and we just followed that trend like the people in the game, being disrespectful, hating, distrusting, etc. What made America so great was that our nationality didn't unite us, or race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or party affiliation, but rather united by the fundamental fact that we are all humans and deserve to live in peace and harmony. Now, however, we've seemed to look past that we're all humans, that we're separate because some of us don't have a US passport, or are liberal, or are supporters of a group. We learned to be hateful, to be unreasonable, to be disrespectful, to be negligent, to be different just like the fear we shaped. We have become what we beheld.
