Thursday, June 13, 2019

Two Sides

Recently in the news, a fairly unsurprising type of story. Some women had to sue in order to get their rape kits processed. Instead of pursuing the cases, police and judges had been saying things like, "You shouldn't have been out alone at night."

I know, I know, but I want to think about it for a minute. The country right now is in a state of deep division, and it is because some people think like this, and some people think you should blame the rapist and not the victim.

These are two very different ways of thinking, two assumptions about why we are here and how we should handle ourselves as citizens and as human beings.

First is the belief that bad people are an inevitable reality of the world, and it is commonsense to avoid being hurt by them. For instance, if women stayed indoors and dressed modestly and avoided alcohol and went out in groups there would be fewer opportunities to rape them, and they would be safer. If gay people stay closeted it is less likely that rednecks will harass them. Also black people, if they stayed "in their place," stayed on their side of town and worked in their kind of jobs, police wouldn't shoot them so much and white people wouldn't keep dangling nooses near them. If Mexicans just stayed in Mexico, you get what I'm saying. There is danger, and the solution is to avoid it by staying where you belong and doing what you should do.

To many, it is simply realistic to assume that there are bad people who will do bad things, and the rational approach is to take care not to provoke them. Some of those bad people are very powerful and, again, the smart thing is to be careful not to upset them. To people who think this way, that's just reality, and it's crazy not to accept it.

The other view is that bad behaviors should be eliminated or reduced, and bad people should be responsible for what they do. Say a gay person or a black person, a Hmong or a Sikh or a Jew, ventures into a hostile suburb and gets beaten up. From this second point of view you would blame the racists or homophobes who committed the violence, and take steps to stop them from behaving in this way. If this sort of thing is a common problem you could address it as a social issue and try to change it through norms or even laws. The idea would be that people should be able to walk around in public and do what they need to do without being harassed or discriminated against. From this point of view it seems that the problem is intolerance, and society's goal is to reduce activities based on intolerance that affect the recipient (aka victim) of such behaviors.

Two different points of view, and we all see it both ways, depending on context and our own motives. Life is frightening and we should be careful, life is good but it could be better.