Elitism

If we spend more time looking up to loftier goals and less time looking down in criticism of others, our species will be doing a much better job as citizens of the planet.

I observe an innate tendency in myself to classify. I know this has been explored by neuroscience and found to be a way of the brain helps me to survive. But, my better self is getting quite tired of struggling with it.

I have been criticized throughout my life for being "a loner", as opposed to "a joiner". It started most horribly when my height superseded normal limits for a prepubescent boy. I was immediately labeled as a "basketballer" by everyone, including my father, who had played minor-league professional basketball in the 1930s and 1940s.

I was useless with air-inflated spheres and mini-blimps of all kinds. Really useless and potentially dangerous. I seemed to unintentionally injure as many of my own teammates as members of the opposing team. While experiencing subjective panic, I exhibited the external behaviors of a rogue elephant on crack. Bodies littered the courts and fields upon which I played. I was usually left standing, unbruised, quizzically observing the damage, while a red-faced coach pulled madly at his hair and screamed invectives at me.

This led me to the personal discovery that earlier observations about me were quite right: Loner, not joiner. Perhaps this discovery, as I trudged grimly into adolescence, saved me psychologically, since I discovered rather quickly that I am homosexual. 'Ah,' I thought in a deep, inexplicable way, 'so this is what it's all about. I am different. And, I'm the kind of different they don't want around. Well, why bother to join anyway?'

Voila! A natural dissident and dissenter emerged from the hive of working-class America.

So, as a solo dancer, I have been able to observe, and often struggle with, the dynamics of group behavior personally and professionally for nearly five decades. It all boils down to some basics: There are leaders and followers; there are in-groupers and out-groupers; there are perpetrators and victims; there are better-thans and worse-thans; there are better-offs and worse-offs; there are smarter-thans and dumber-thans; there are parental favorites and black sheep...and so on.

As a nurse and a social activist, I have often had to insert myself between these various subgroups of humanity in various situations. I have chosen to protect the abused from the abusers. I have chosen to defend the effeminate from the tyranny of the butch. I have chosen to protect the dying from the callously living.

The propensity for people in groups to form in-groups is a cancer that defeats the ethical energy of many good causes. The urge for control and domination lives in every human being, I believe. It is animal, instinctual, a left-over from life in caves. The sad fact is that those with the strongest and least self-examined aggression in groups usually lead them. This propagates both the genetic and cultural transmission of aggressive behavior in groups. Unfortunately, the same genes which are probably linkable to aggression in groups are also apparently linked to appealing looks, the ability to hoard capital and reproductive potency.

I believe this is how elites are formed and become entrenched in social structures across the planet. Once established, it takes a French Revolution of effort and horrors to expunge them.

My choice has been to dance alone within groups. This is must be done gingerly. The seduction of elitism is very enticing indeed. Just look at the American celebrity obsession for evidence. American Idol...need I say more? Keeping one's own rhythm in the symphony of conformity to the us-them dichotomy, the core of elitism, is tricky business. It doesn't earn a person testimonials, awards or sinecures.

Ah, but it is so rewarding in itself! I have learned something by being a death-watcher. I have seen over a thousand individual deaths as a hospice nurse during an epidemic. I have seen the deaths of the elite. I have seen the deaths of the confused conformists. I have seen the deaths of the solo dancers, like myself. I will simply say that I feel the way a person dies of aging or prolonged illness can indicate the true core of how they have lived. Dying slowly is the greatest solo dance of them all. Those who have practiced the dance in life are the most adept at doing it with peace to its inevitable end.

Opinion

I am concerned about a current tendency to confuse privately held opinions, shared between correspondents or confidantes, and public declarations. I am noticing frequent, slow-newsday pieces in the media about leaked emails, which were never meant to be public information. Usually, these emails have something to do with gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality.

A person thinks such-and-such about gay people, for instance, as expressed to a friend or colleague in a private message. Someone gets hold of this by someone else pressing "Reply All" when responding to the email or by some other thoughtless mistake or by some malicious intent to settle a score. Suddenly, the person who wrote the email or made the comment is subjected to public shaming by a press conference held by some anti-defamation group, to whom the email has been sent or comment repeated.

If we all start having the same opinion about everyone and everything, there will be no room for constructive criticism in our culture. Without constructive criticism, we will stagnate and get more stupid than we already are. This is the nightmare of political correctness, which seems to be endlessly encroaching upon society's tolerance for varied or eccentric opinion.

The issue which does not get addressed often enough in these instances is the total lack of ethical accountability on the part of the leakers of private information to public media. In an era when most people rail against privacy violations when it is inconvenient for them, I find it rather hypocritical that these same people salivate over the opportunity to throw stones at someone whose private correspondence is exposed and found to be politically (conformistly) incorrect.

This is all very immature and unconstructive. If you wish to encourage sound, progressive dialogue on issues of difference between people, this type of mob shaming through politically correct media press conferences, based on purloined documents which violate a person's right to privacy, is as offensive, in my opinion, as saying the "f" word or the "q' word or the "n" word. It is the adult form of school-yard, "gotcha" bullying. It accomplishes nothing positive.

Israel

The current Biden-visit flap about construction in East Jerusalem and Prime Minister Netanyahu's exploitation of the situation in the U.S. to self-righteously rally American Jewish supporters of Israel for increased financial and political support seems a transparent attempt by a foreign government to shape U.S. foreign policy as it effects the entire Middle East and beyond. While I understand the sentimental significance of Israel as Jewish Homeland, I do not understand how a nation, formed in reaction to persecution and prejudice, can continue to foster socioeconomic, ethnic apartheid within its borders. To exploit a contentious issue, like increased incursions into traditionally Palestinian areas, seems to indicate that the Israeli government is committed to solidifying that apartheid, rather than loosening and eventually dismantling it.

Palestinians are impoverished and debased. Some may say by their own doing. However, an impoverished and debased population will not respond to more debasement and more marginalization with anything but hatred and violence. As a person with some genetic Jewish roots, I fail to see how rational, democratic, American Jews can cheer and hoot Mr. Netanyahu's obvious delight at goading the Palestinian people. This looks like hatred-based, ethnocentric bullying to me.