How To React to Majority Not Wanting Help
In trying to reconfigure my mindset, my goals, expectations, outlook and focus in the new circumstance of Trump’s win, an analogy has come to mind that is a crude but helpful map to guide my thinking.
This is the analogy of the bullied kid. You’re in high school (at this point it’s hard, but try to pretend that far back for a moment) and you see that some kid is getting harassed every day by a bully. Your noble character rises up and you decide you’re going to stand with the kid against the bully, even though it could mean you getting a broken nose. You might rally some like-minded students to stand with you to help the kid. You might get that group to go to the principal and demand a serious effort to end bullying.
You approach the kid, proudly if nervously, with your declaration to stand with the kid, damn the consequences. You explain about possibly getting an end to bullying. The kid shouts, “No!”. They don’t want an end to bullying, a school in which no one gets free lunch money or anything else by bullying. They hope to become a bully themselves. Or at least be a hanger-on to a group of bullies so they can get some of the benefit. In fact they really hope to get on the ins with their bully and join them, to be part of a gang led by this bully and they can be part of it.
Further, it’s not just that kid. If you had gotten the principal’s permission to put an anti-bullying campaign to a vote of the students it would have lost. By a small majority, but still, a majority.
“Oh!” is your reaction. Here you had considered the dangers and consequences of standing against the bully. You had watched and studied how bullying was going on in your school. You realized you weren’t likely to be a target because bullies picked different kinds of targets, but that there were plenty of those who seemed vulnerable. You read academic studies to understand bullying and what might work to reduce it. You’d planned out how you were going to approach the principal and planned your own project against bullying. You’d written something to go into the next student newspaper edition. The one thing you hadn’t counted on, never even considered, was that the one being bullied didn’t want any of that. Much less that they actually wanted to join the bullies.
Oh, well, okay then. All that effort and having yourself geared up for possible sacrifice can now be dropped. Just go on and live your life as if you’re in a world where the whole issue doesn’t exist. If you’re not likely to be a target, then in a way it doesn’t. Sort of like people who never read the news and just do their job and enjoy their garden. Your life just got easier. Less complicated, less stressful, less negativity in what you deal with day to day.
If I had to guess, I think most people who read DCReport will continue on to try to find what is the next way to try to thwart bullying. There are, after all, almost half who don’t want it, many of whom are vulnerable likely targets. And the “comfort” in this analogy has joined to it the disappointment of finding out the majority want to be on the bullying side.
Even if we carry on it does relieve a piece of the sense of obligation. If efforts to coral bullying fail, it’s not for lack of effort. It’s because there’s that much in humanity that is against it. Many things can be fixed or altered, but reality cannot be changed. That’s a fool’s goal. One that will not lead to productive action.
And you have an obligation to life. DCReport readers I would guess tend to be sensitive to their obligations. Consuming yourself in excessive focus on changing something a majority don’t want changed, to the neglect of a proper degree of focus on appreciation of the gift of life, is to neglect something that has the first among priorities.
Take all these fuzzy, overlapping pieces of the puzzle of going forward and put them into the perspective that your judgments deem best. But don’t ignore the message that a majority just sent, that they don’t want this fixed. Perhaps find in that a chance to take a breath for a while, and then see what balance makes sense going forward.
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