I took the opportunity tonight to go to a memorial service in honor of the three teenage boys who were found murdered yesterday in Israel. I felt compelled to have a place to mourn, to be surrounded by community and felt I needed to do something proactively and effortful to make a statement about how I felt condemning such acts of hatred and aggression.
I was moved by the words of wisdom spoken by clergy and the mounds of people that listened attentively and earnestly. We all sat in unity sharing our grief and each expressing it in our own individual ways. I wavered between having profound sadness, frustration and a yearning to make a better world for my children. I couldn’t help but connect to the deep grief I imagined their parents, family and friends must be feeling. I couldn’t help but relate to it and connect to “What if it were my children?”
I thought of all the kidnappings and destitution all over the world that plagues our society. I couldn’t help but think about the recent abduction of 200 Nigerian girls that were kidnapped from their school and never to be found and the estimated 115 children that are abducted by strangers every year in the United States (estimated by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children). I cry for all the innocent children who are taken because of the injustices of adults who dehumanize them because of their race, religion, gender or because they serve their self-serving purposes.
I am blessed by having two living Holocaust survivor grandmothers present in my life. Several years ago I videotaped their life stories and got a full account of the trauma they endured during the war. It included having their families murdered, personally being in concentration camps and living their middle to late teen years in fear for their lives. One grandmother asked me, “I don’t understand, how could they have done this to us, they are humans like us, can’t they imagine what we must be feeling and going through”? She desperately wanted to know how it was that she was so fiercely dehumanized.
I couldn’t help but well up with tears with the thought of my grandmother being treated and seen as a non-human. I explained to her that they have had to dehumanize her in order to cut off any relatedness to her or empathy toward her plight. Because of her religion they categorized her as a non-human which gave them justification for treated her any way in which they chose to.
These examples are larger scale ways in which individuals experience dehumanization. The rationalizations of their captors or perpetrators provide those individuals with the rationale to grossly and mercilessly mistreat their victims. There are smaller scale ways in which we could all take responsibility in being more open and humanistic.
I am constantly hearing ways in which people berate themselves and others. I find it uncanny that when I ask my patients to remark on what is positive about themselves they generally ponder and find few characteristics. When I ask them what they find problematic and would like to change about themselves, they readily answer and have a lot more to say. I consistently make them aware when they are judging things and others as better or worse or good and bad and when they are disparaging toward themselves.
Just the other day I was sitting at a Starbucks and I overheard a woman say to her adolescent child, “Look at that crazy boy, you better not act like that or people will be talking about you like that.” Today I received a text from a friend saying, “I just need to lose 5 pounds and tone up to feel better about myself.” Several weeks ago I heard one of my children saying to the other, “That’s so gay.” From all of this I cringe. We are dehumanizing ourselves and others by the way in which we judge, criticize and express ourselves. I take full responsibility for my part in it.
I never want to identify with the aggressor and if I can make an impact to treat others in a more humanistic way, I will do my part. The first step is within each of us. To make a better life for ourselves and those we surround ourselves with we need to make concerted effort.
That effort includes:
- Being cognizant of the sweeping comparisons and generalizations we make which lead our sometimes harsh judgments,
- Recognize when we are thinking and feeling critical toward ourselves and others,
- Rather than thinking about what is “wrong” with the other and judging ourselves for that thought or feeling, forgiving ourselves for what is just a thought or feeling and making an effort to redirect the focus and understand why it is that it evokes such intense feeling within us and what meaning it holds for us, and
- Understand that disdaining parts of ourselves and others, means distaining all parts of ourselves and others. We are equal to the sum of our parts.
We can contribute to humanizing our society by being compassionate to ourselves and others and acting in accordance with our humanistic values. I took my almost six year old daughter out to dinner tonight and she said to me, “Mommy I need to be nice to others so that I can fill my bucket. I want to keep filling it and filling it because it feels so good in my heart.” Such innocence. Let’s work together to fill our buckets.
