In December of 2016 Google published their "Google-Year in Search" video, a zeitgeist. It made me stop and think. I have kept coming back to it and have watched it over ten times. It is an excellent two-minute snapshot of the past year, and I encourage you to watch it if you've got the time.
"We are a more divided nation than we have ever been."
"It's compete tragedy and misery."
"Love does not despair. Love gives us hope that change is possible."
"If you take away the labels, you realize that we are far more alike than we are different"
"Love cannot be killed or swept aside. Now fill the world with music, love, and pride."
2016 was a year of love and of loss. It was a year made joyous by love, bitter by loss, and somehow sweet again by more love. It was a broken year because we live in a broken age of war, cultural insensitivity, misunderstanding, and messed up people parading our streets and filling our worlds with terror. It was a paradigm shift of a year; one in which history books will point to.This was an earthquake year, and societies across the globe ache in the wake of its destruction.
Recently I heard a story run on the podcast This American Life about4-year-oldgirl learning about radical ideology for the first time. One Christmas she became curious about Jesus and who He was. She asked her dad all about Him, and eventually she knew all of the stories. She heard that the Romans killed Him because some of the things He taught, equality and love, were too different for their society. About a month later she saw a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and asked her dad who he was. He replied that Dr. King was a preacher for Jesus who also taught that no matter what we look like that we should all be treated the same. The four-year-old child sat for a moment.
Then she asked, "Did they kill him too?" (This American Life, "Kid Logic")
Radicals will always be scary to the conservative population. This isn't to say they are divinely inspired or that every group is righteous, but radical thought, good or bad, challenges norms and forces us to examine important issues.
We've all heard it said that knowledge is power. While knowledge isn't everything, it does help us accept the things we don't understand from our own experience and view the world in a more open way. Knowledge presents the capacity to sympathize and not try to empathize blindly.
With a broader scope, perspective not only allows us to hear out other arguments, but to really think about them. Frankly, it is so much easier to buy into ideas that confirm your beliefs rather than seeking out opposition to wrestle with. This one is especially hard for me. I tend to live into confirmation bias because anyone who I don't agree with just makes me too angry. I'll have to work on that because I cannot pretend to have a holistic view of anything without both sides.
We have made so much progress up to this point, but obviously there is still so much left to work on. I would love to be disgustingly optimistic about 2017 but not without action. Moreover, I pledge to apologize more but in a meaningful way, and I pledge to be an active participant in movements I believe in. And finally, I pledge to be an active citizen of the world staying as informed as possible.