The Death of Nuance

Posted: April 10, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Some serious questions here:

Has society completely moved beyond the ability for nuanced thought?

Have our social-media echo-chambers become so loud around us we can no longer even consider accepting that something outside of the myopic lens through which our in-groups view the world might also be valid even if it doesn’t completely align with our position?

Has the fear of being ostracized for contemplating a contrary opinion forced people into a shameful silence even when they know they’ve got a good point to add to the conversation, albeit an unpopular one?

Is it no longer possible to remain friends with someone who agrees with you on 99% of all things, because that single last percent upsets your world view?

Can people no longer simply agree to disagree?

I think it’s a fair statement to say that no one thinks babies deserve to die, correct? No matter the context, that should not be a controversial opinion. I’m not talking about taking a stance on abortion or anything of that sort here; I mean living, breathing, eating and shitting human babies. Nobody of sound mind wants a baby to suffer and die, right? And anybody who does actively want to harm an infant can be defined a monster in every sense of the word, am I right? Like, wanting babies to not be exposed to violence is pretty much the default setting for any sane human, no real nuance required around that. I think it’s safe to say that everyone can agree on that point, and if you find yourself on the fence around that then you should most definitely seek professional help. Quickly, please.

I bring this up because of a conversation that I had with an old friend last week, and by ‘old’, I mean I’ve known them for decades, not that they’re particularly old of age, thank you very much. They can’t be, because that would mean I’m old too, and while I’m experienced in life and have gained much wisdom, I wouldn’t quite put myself in the ‘old’ category just yet.

But, I digress.

I was talking to this friend about my least favourite yet most popular topic of conversation over the last six months: The Israel-Hamas War. I have already written and made my position on Hamas clear several times over the years, so I won’t reiterate that any further here than to say that Hamas sucks donkey balls and they are the epitome of human evil and against everything I stand for. I can’t really put it any plainer than that. In my opinion, Hamas also left Israel no choice but to move onto the war-footing they’ve had on full display ever since the disgusting attacks on October 7th, six months ago. Hamas knew exactly what the outcome would be from their atrocious actions, and they got exactly what they wanted, the fuckers.

Discussing this with my friend, a Christian who grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and whose close circle of friends are majority Jews and have been since they were in Primary School together (and who is one of the people I have always believed would hide Jews were the Nazis to ever come again; a child’s paranoid fantasy that lately is starting to feel all to real), they brought up how one of their best friends from their very close-group are no longer talking to them because my friend-in-question had the audacity to say that they felt sad about the Palestinian babies who were caught in the cross-fire of this conflict; nothing about the right or wrong of the war (which, for the record, they were one of the few non-Jews on my page who spoke out against the October 7th attacks when they happened), simply that they felt sad about the babies caught up in the war. One of their very best and closest friends completely cut them off for saying that. Friends for almost fifty years; practically siblings, now completely cut off for the horrible crime of having empathy for people under two years old who don’t have any comprehension about what they’re living through, and a number of whom are dying violently or on the brink of starvation.

What. The. Fuck.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but it shouldn’t be a friendship altering opinion to not want babies to be killed. Even Palestinian ones. Are there horrible Palestinian people who want the deaths of all Jews? Yes. From what I understand, a majority of them are totally cool with that. And I further understand that most Palestinians have been brought up to believe that Jews want to kill them too. But I don’t think an infant who can’t even open their eyes yet can be included in either number simply because they’re too young to even know what a Jew or a Muslim is.

I can say with the appropriate amount of shame that I spent the first two decades of my life believing that all Arabs wanted me dead. All of them. They all hated me just for being me, and therefore they were the enemy and to be always treated with suspicion and held away further than arms-length. I was once even assaulted while visiting Israel at age sixteen with my grandparents by a group of Arab-Israeli roughians over the peace-sign on my t-shirt when I had gone off alone for a walk to sneak a cigarette, and I know they were Arab because they kept calling me a ‘peace-loving Jew’ as they were rolling me. So far, everything was lining up with what I’d been brought up to believe about how awful they were and completely justified my racism (and let’s be honest, that’s what it was).

A few years later, I was in Israel again, this time without adult supervision, and outside of my familial cocoon, my horizons broadened.

The first stone that brought down my wall of ignorance was provided by a kindly Israeli-Muslim who picked my buddy and I up while we were hitchhiking and provided us with the most enlightening conversation of my life as he drove us from Afula to Tel Aviv. He knew that we were unaware he was an Arab-Israeli when he picked us up because he had relatively pale skin compared to the stereotypes of the region, but he didn’t let us know this information until the car had gotten back on the highway and he saw our palpable discomfort when he told us, and we were honest and let him know that where we come from, the opinion was that all Arabs hate all Jews, and that’s that. Not going to lie here: We were pretty freaked out for a moment or two and honestly considered ditching from a moving car at highway speeds might be the safer option.

Except for that he then told us his wife and kids were Jewish.

Ummm… So, clearly he didn’t hate all Jews. And, as he told us more about his life in Israel, it soon became abundantly obvious that he didn’t hate Jews at all, and frankly seemed to have a bigger problem with his fellow Arabs who roused so much rabble all of the time, so to speak.

Huh.

This dude was the exact opposite of everything we’d been brought up to believe. But, he must be an outlier, right?

That same weekend, my buddy and I ended up in the Old City of Jerusalem, half drunk in the afternoon and wandering around looking for a place to play handball that wouldn’t feel blasphemous. Spoiler alert, the city is so fucking old and holy that we couldn’t find a good spot for our game, not to mention that streets and alleys are ridiculously thin in the old city, so we wouldn’t have had a lot of room to maneuver even if we had managed to find a good wall to bounce against.

Instead of handball, we set to wandering and ended up in what we thought was a lovely little rooftop parkette where we could smoke cigarettes, crack jokes, and people-watch. Of course, being the ignorant idiots that we were, we had no clue that we had completely intruded into someone’s yard and the people we were watching were the owners of the house we had basically all but broken into. Even more problematic, we didn’t realize that we had somehow gone into the Arab Quarter of the Old City, and we were not only trespassing in some Arab family’s garden, but were interrupting their afternoon tea time as well. Oops!

But, here’s the craziest thing – They didn’t call the cops or security on us. They didn’t draw guns on us or chase us off with a stick. Do you want to know what these evil Arabs did when they found us intruding on their property? Those abhorrent bastards fucking fed us sweet-cakes and desserts! Oh, the humanity! How dare they give us honeyed tea and candy in exchange for trespassing and basically disrespecting their privacy? Straight-up evil, am I right?

Of course I’m not right, and that weekend I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: To stop looking at races and people like they’re a monolith.

Are there Arabs who hate me and want to beat me up or kill me for wearing a shirt with a peace sign on it? Obviously, yes. But, there are also Arabs who will feed and befriend me, or give a ride to a complete stranger. Are there Jews who hate and fear all Muslims just for being born? Sadly, also yes, but as our driving friend taught us, there are also Jews who will fall in love, marry, and make families with Muslims.

Nuance. Not everyone is the same. Even in a majority, there are always outliers, and that’s something that society seems to either have forgotten, or that an uncomfortably large number of us have just decided to ignore. The world is not as black and white as we sometimes want to believe it is, and it never has been.

Those pesky shades of grey, am I right?

So, yes, it’s okay to believe that Israel in the case of the current war has the right and responsibility to defend itself and its citizens, while also believing that dead babies are horrible. It’s possible to be pro-Israel while at the same time believing that Netanyahu is a total piece of shit who has failed his country miserably. It’s okay to be a Palestinian who favours a two-state solution but is afraid for the lives of their families if they speak out against Hamas. All of these people exist, and all deserve to be considered.

Even the ones we hate.

You can be for the war, while at the same time acknowledging that war is horrible. No one else has walked in your shoes, and no one else has the reasons you have for taking whatever position you have.

And while keeping that in mind, you also need to remember that you haven’t walked in anyone else’s shoes either, okay?

Although many of us have walked next to each other on the path, we haven’t had the same annoying pebbles in our boots or cramps in our toes, so even those of us who have the same stories and experiences around 99% of our lives together, we still have those few differences that set us apart as individuals, and with individual beings comes individual thought, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s awesome! That’s what helps us to grow and become better people.

Our goal should be to listen to others and try to understand from where their opinions arise, and to share ours as well, and to come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going to think or feel the same way we do; to understand that everybody brings their own nuanced (that pesky word again) perspective to things that are worth hearing even when we don’t agree, especially when those perspectives are being brought by friends and loved ones. We don’t have to agree on everything to be friends, just the important things.

Like the fact that dead babies suck.

And, even if we for some reason can’t align on that fact, we at least don’t have to be rude about it.

For me, that’s where the time to cut people out of your life comes – Not when you disagree about something, especially in an overly complicated and emotional war-time situation, but when people get mean, rude, or disrespectful. You can disagree with someone without being a dick about it, people! I know that can be hard to believe in this age of Twitter where social-media trolls are ten for twelve cents (shrinkflation – thanks Trudeau!), but we don’t have to be mean and nasty to each other simply for having a different perspective.

Except for Nazis, of course. Fuck those guys right in the eye. Be mean to them.